EXTRY! EXTRY! READ ALL ABOUT IT!
For a change, I actually have a bit of news to report to you lot. Last night, after a so-called dry spell lasting a full six months, I finally nabbed a full-on, certifiable date suitable for recording in the venerable annals of McGyver Bird-Pullage. Not that it led to anything promising, but really I shouldn't get ahead of myself here, or discount the intrinsic worthwhileness of the date, a worthwhileness ascribable to it on account of the fact that, in contrast to 98.3 per cent of my prospective assignations, it actually took place. I met the the female who, along with yours truly, was to be party to this event last Wednesday at lunchtime in the queue at the office teria, where we happened to find ourselves simultaneously negotiating the spearing of a certain especially truculent slab of pot roast. As neither of us would yield possession of this trophy to the other, we ended by bearing it jointly, with our two forks, to a plate that we likewise conveyed ensemble to the nearest unoccupied table, at which, from the mundane subject of how best to divvy up the spoils of the hunt, we digressed to such other, loftier topics as 'What will you be fancying for dessert?' and 'Who the fuck are you anyway?' and 'Where are you from?' Well, by the time the back-to-work whistle (i.e., the reminder alarms on our respective mobiles) blew, we had agreed to meet on Saturday for coffee or dinner or 'something like that'. In the meantime, I'd learnt her name (Sarah Slother), what part of the Kingdom she hailed from (nearby Hitchin, Herts., where she still resided), and her position in the company (Junior Editorial Associate for Public Relations). Now, I know full well that certain Puritan business-ethicists regard fraternisation (i.e. fuckage) between or amongst co-workers at a given organisation, be the organisation in question ever so gargantuan, as a cardinal sin; and in a spirit of deference verging on abject servility, I entreat each and every one of these Fordian Cromwells to quaff a hearty and frothy draught of jizzim from the Stella tap that is my King Dong. Although this woman, by her own account, had been employed at the company a full two months longer than I had, I had never set my optics on her. Her position placed her in a completely different branch of the company hierarchy from my own, and the task of determining which of us, in theory, was senior to the other was such as would have been worthy of only the most pathetically dedicated genealogy anorak. In short, there can be no question of the daemon of sexual harrassment's having reared its horny head in connection with the arrangement of this particular tryst. So, anyway, on the evening of the following day, Thursday, I give Sarah a ring and ask her what she has in mind for Saturday. She replies: 'I was thinking we might meet up for dinner...' (dinner rather than coffee or 'something like that'--that was promising) '...at this Kernevistani restaurant that I've heard good things about.' Christ on a schlong! I groan to myself, Another fucking ethnic cuisine I've never heard of. Aloud, I say, 'Oh, a Kernevistani restaurant. I've been meaning to make my way back down to Little Kernevistan for some time now. It's one of my favourite parts of town; you could call it my second home, in fact.' She either doesn't understand, or doesn't appreciate, my little joke: 'Actually, the restaurant's in Shoreditch. Do you think you'd be up for going there?' 'Oh, I'd be more than up for it: I'd be all about it.' In fact, if I'd had my druthers, we would have gone to Emchai or Curry Paradise (see my last post), or, straying slightly farther afield of my stomping grounds, Nid Ting in Archway. But from long and painful experience I knew better than to give these druthers of mine a proper airing; I knew that, to the contrary, in my capacity as a bloke, I had to keep them well under lock and key. If a bloke is to get beyond game one of the European Cup Final that is his so-called relationship with a given girl, he needs must feign ignorance on all matters that are--rightly or wrongly--held by so-called society to be feminine territory, and haut cuisine is just one of many such areas. Unless he's a professional chef, a bloke who asks a girl he's just met out to his favourite restaurant is just priming himself at the kick-off for a final score of nil. The restaurant in question may be the poshest, most girl-friendly eatery within a five-postal-code radius, and that'll count for zip in the eyes of the female in question, who'll somehow contrive to picture it as the seediest, blokiest dive east of Detroit or north of Alice Springs. It's sort of our era's version of the Don Quixote syndrome, you see, but turned upside-down, in two or more dimensions. Well, anyway, having resigned myself to gobbing it Kernevistani-style on Saturday, I thought I might as well scout out the lie of the land as best I could, and so, as soon as I was off the blower with Sarah, I jumped on to the Time Out website--that is, the Dining Out part of the website--and did a quick nergle of the word 'Kernevistani,' which turned up the following entry:
Bosty Drog
17 Hoxton Market
N1 6HG
Shoreditch
020 7793 8221
London's first--and so far, only--Kernevistani restaurant and Shoreditch's best-kept culinary secret. Chef Kadan Korin whips up a mabyar kernewek with rosemary and garlic that's TDAHYCDAQAF (To Die And Have Your Corpse Drawn And Quartered Afterwards For). And don't forget to save some room for a dollop or two of the déhen rew, arguably the most delectable dish in Kernevistan's cornucopcic and criminally underrated national cuisine.
No surprises here, just the usual largely uninfomative hyperbolic backwash of foodcritickese. Well, I'd done my best, intelligence-wise; all I could do now otherwise was to make sure to stow an extra-large bottle of milk of magnesium in the glove compartment of the Mazda (I read 'best-kept culinary secret,' you see, as code for 'sanitation scandal in the making'--it was the only useful bit in the whole capsule). Oh, yeah, while I'm on the subject of the Mazda, I guess I might as well crack open another parenthesis--as I crack open my fourth Stella of the evening--and explain that, during the above-quoted conversation, I had agreed to drive us to the restaurant. Once again, if I'd had my druthers, we would have tubed the trip, as the Drog is sited but a brisk ten-minutes' walk from the Old Street tube station, and that station is a straight shot down the Northern Line from Woodside Park. But Sarah, being a Hertfordshire girl born, bred, and braised, was skittish about riding on the tube, somewhat understandably on account of what went down on 7/7, somewhat less understandably on account of her fear that we might be mugged along the way. I could have explained to her that the odds of our being mugged on the tube were far smaller than our odds of being mugged during our foot-trek from the car to the restaurant, given that any parking space we'd be lucky enough to land would almost certainly be much farther from the restaurant than the tube station was; but, again, for reasons not widely diverging in character from the ones cited above in connection with the choice of venue, I held my piss.
So, just after dusk of the big day, such as it was, I did the old four esses and donned my shorts, string vest, best slacks and button-up, etc., stepping into my Skechers just as the doorbell rang, announcing Sarah's arrival. As we've got a 7:30 reservation and it's coming on to a quarter of seven, I don't invite her in for a spritzer or any other sort of pre-aperatif, as I might have done if we'd had more time, but instead simply close the front door behind me and point to the Mazda--which is parked directly out front--with a sweeping, Z-Z-Top-esque 'Après vous'-type gesture. The drive into town was relatively painless, what with traffic being unusually light by London-nightlife-rush-hour standards. The only real snag was presented by a double-parked lorry at the junction of the East Finchley High Road and Fortis Green, which slowed us down to a sub-pedestrian speed for about ten minutes as we waited for the sub-competent sub-cunts ahead of us to merge into the adjoining lane. If only the conversation had been as unharrowing as the drive. Alas, before we'd even made it to the end of Woodside Avenue, Sarah was subjecting me to the old third-degree. She starts by asking me, 'So what was it that got you interested in pursuing a career in the medical supplies industry in the first place?' which, I don't mind telling you, is just the sort of question to send my fingers scurrying for my top shirt button. I went to university to be an accountant, you see, and as a newly-certified accountant, I simply took the best accountancy job I could find at the first go-round, which job simply happened to be the one I presently hold, as junior accounts receivable associate at Proctologitex, Ltd. If that job had happened to be junior accounts receivable associate at Phocicidex, Ltd, manufacturers of the clubs used for drubbing to death baby seals, I would just as cheerfully have gone to work for Phocicidex, Ltd. The so-called corporate mission of whoever I happen to be working for, you see, is of absolutely no interest to me; and I suspect that all professional accountants feel the same way about the so-called corporate missions of their respective employers. Sarah, on the other hand, as I've already said, works in public relations, in which field it is apparently part of the culture, as they say, both on the clock and off, to pretend you actually give a rancid Arsenal goalkeeper's schphincter about your bosses' ratoinale for their particular line of pound, dollar, and euro-hoovering. And so, naturally (but not in the least understandably), she's a bit put off when I tell her, in five or fewer minutes, more or less all of what I've just told you, gentle reader, about my reasons for working at Proctologitex. Fortunately, I manage to keep the conversation from lapsing into a so-called awkward silence by turning the tables on her, as they say, by asking her what it was that got her so enthused about working in the medical supplies industry, and at Proctologitex specifically, etc.; and her reply to this question keeps her jaw and my ear busy for the remainder of the trip. The gist of her rationale was that ever since she was a wee lass she'd always wanted to help people, and that she could think of nothing more fundamentally helpful to people than proctological technology, and the spreading of the good word thereabout. It sounded like absolute bollocks to me, but then who was I to judge (at least openly)? Anyway, all the while she's jawing, I every now and then, mainly when we're idling at stop lights, get a decent gander at her face from the side, and I can't help finding it a lot less appealing in profile than I found it straight-on the other day. I notice that she's got what I call a classic shark's profile, with a pointy nose and a sharply receding chin, a profile I've never been much of a fan of; not but that any female phiz might not eventually grow on you. The way things were going, though, I doubted this one ever would do.
Parking was a breeze--I snagged a spot on a side street only a couple of hundred metres farther up Old Street than the the tube station itself--and thus, so was the walk to the restaurant. The whole way, I felt as though a 20-stone bloke in a gorilla costume, the personification of stroppiness, had just been helicopter-lifted off my shoulders. Of course, from door to door we had to run a well-staffed gauntlet of junkies, hippies, prostitutes, and assorted other demimondial layabouts, but that hardly sufficed to dampen my spirits (although Sarah seemed a bit fazed by the process), because I'd expected as much in the vicinity of Hoxton, which I knew at firsthand to be one of the dodgier corners of Whoreditch. 'It's at moments like this one,' I mused aloud, 'that you wonder if maybe old Ken Livingstone isn't such a monster after all.' Sarah said she didn't know that he was supposed to be a monster in the first place. Well, there's your fucking Home Counties hothouse flowers for you, I said to myself.
Luckily, the spirit of the evening started to head cooperatively back downhill once we got to the restaurant. First, we learned from the hostess that because we'd shown up two (!) minutes after the time of our reservation, we'd lost our table, and that there'd be a '37-to-54 minute wait' for another one. Ordinarily, in such a situation, I'd have adjourned to the bar, but it turned out that there was no bar up in this piece, and so we had to spend all 58 (!) minutes of the interval shivering in a particularly draughty spot right up against the front door, deprived of the consolation of alcohol. And I certainly could have done with a few pints of Stella (Cor, I would have settled for Miller Light!) by way of fortification against the Slotherian monologic avalanche that I had unwittingly touched off a half-an-hour earlier in the car, and whose progress, presumably, had been only momentarily by checked during our walk by the ambient ropiness of the street scene. She was a veritable dynamo of terminally tedious personal anecdotage centring on such singularly uninspired topics as her dad's lumbago, her mum's bridge club, and her academic itinerary at the execrable University of Luton (or Loserton, as it's known to us East Anglia alumns). More than once towards the end of this so-called conversation, I have to confess, I caught myself tugging at my belt and panning my eyes round the ceiling in search of a rafter that might be sturdy enough to bear the weight of my 10-stone carcass.
Well, eventually, as I've already intimated, they did show us to a table, and during another unconscionably long interval between our being seated and the arrival of our waiter, I had plenty of opportunity for scoping out the place and sizing it up. What struck you immediately was the outlandishness of the costumes of the staff: the blokes were all dressed in these long, flowing gowns with headdresses, exactly like the togs of Arab sheiks, but powder-blue coloured rather than white; whilst the girls wore white silk blouses on top and on bottom, kiltish-looking skirts woven or dyed in this peculiar plaid of dark blue cross-hatched with a shade of off-yellow or chartreuse that made me glad I wasn't an epileptic. As for the architectural layout of the place--well it was impossible to guess from it what part of the world these Kernevistanis hailed from. On the one hand, you might have plausibly called it modern Scandinavian, on the other, you might have just as plausibly called it classic Polynesian. From front to back, and from floor to ceiling, the walls were panelled in horizontally-orientated black wooden beams each about a handspan wide, and the tables and even the benches flanking the tables were made of the same materials. The decor was nonexistent--there were none of the usual gegaws, knick-knacks or trinkets that in such places at least allow you to pin down the geography of the ethnic eponym to a specific continent; Christ, there weren't even any shelves to put such gegaws, knick-knacks or trinkets on, if any had been in the offing. The only remotely ornamental thing in the whole place was what I took to be a map, a four-or-five-square-metre tapestry tacked to the wall opposite us, and simply depicting, in stark black silhouette, a single landmass which I took to be Kernevistan, surmounted by what I took to be the word 'Kernevistan' printed in the fearsome characters of some alphabet I had never seen before, that might have been Armenian or Gallifreyan for all I knew. I couldn't identify the landmass with any country I'd ever seen before, although I did have the uncanny sense that I had seen it before. When you used your imagination, it looked rather like the gnarly arm and hand of some randy old geezer reaching leftwards and downwards to grope the melons of some hapless young maiden. When you didn't use your imagination, of course, it looked more or less like what all satellite's-eye views of all landmasses look like, namely, a stubby, two-dimensional turd.
So, the waiter (i.e., one of the blokes) finally came round, and I ordered a Stella--which I was delighted to see they actually had--and Sarah said she'd 'stick with water' (not a good sign); then I took a look at the menu. It was as I'd suspected: no starter under 15 quid, no main course under 30. Time to submit yet again to the depredations of the old culinary wallet hoover. What was worse, and what I hadn't expected, was that the only parts of the menu printed in Roman characters were the names of the dishes; the descriptions were all in the same Armenian or Gallifreyan script that appeared on the map. For the first--and essentially the last--time that evening I feel a sense of a genuine connection between Sarah and myself; because, you see, to my astonishment, she doesn't know how to read Kernevistani either.
'What are you thinking of having?' I ask her tentatively.
'Well, the mabyar kernewek seems a pretty safe bet.'
'Right. After all, Time Out did say that it was TDAN...'
'TDAHYCDAQAF.'
'Right. Well, I guess I'll have that as well.'
'So then, it's mabyar kernewek for two.' She laughs slightly through a smile that, in spite of all that's preceded it, I can't help but be charmed by, or but laugh and smile back at in my turn. There was a bit of gratitude mixed into that laugh and smile too, I have to admit--gratitude directed less towards her and more towards my lucky Stellas for not having put it into her head to mention starters.
Anyway, at this point, I thought I’d take advantage of the window of good feeling to divulge to her all of my aforementioned disenchantment with the furnishings, décor, etc., but to my chagrin she was not at all of my mind on this subject; to the contrary, the human and inhuman geography of the Drog were, in toto, in her words, ‘simply enchanting.’ The inauguration of a full-fledged sulkfest on my end was staved off only by the timely return of the waiter to take our orders for the main course, and subsequently, by my excusing myself for a pee break (that first bottle of Stella having by then wended its way through my kidneys to my bladder). As I was emerging thereafter from the gents, my eye happened to alight on this one sheik who, in contrast to the rest of the staff, who were all scurrying purposively from one corner of the restaurant to the other with or without trays of food, was sort of sauntering casually plumb ahead as slowly as could be, with his hands folded behind his back; and every now and then he would turn his head equally casually and slowly in one direction or the other as if contemplatively yet interestedly taking in every micrometre of his surroundings. From these details of his carriage, I immediately sussed out that this bloke had to be the owner of the restaurant, and in his unlooked-for apparition I saw an opportunity of getting some questions answered that I never would have dared ask back at the table, in Sarah’s presence. And so, seizing hold fast of this opportunity, and cutting what was, if I do say so myself, a masterly swath through the sea of powder blue and epileptoplaid, I marched straight up to him and introduced myself point-blank, and by name, as one of his customers.
‘Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr McGyver,’ he replied, offering me his hand. 'Kadan Korin, head chef and sole proprietor of Bosty Drog. I hope everything has so far been to your satisfaction this evening.’ His accent was smooth, urbane, and mainline posh; with nothing foreign-sounding about it.
‘It’s been perfect.’ (How, I’ll bet you’re now asking me, could you have said that everything was perfect, given that you hadn’t had a single bite to eat yet? Don’t be so quick to call bullshit on me, Mr or Miss Smarty-Knickers. When was the last time you had a skunk-free bottle of Stella at a restaurant in Shoreditch?) ‘All the same, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.’ As I was speaking this last sentence, I realised it made me come off sounding like a representative of the Law (in this case, by default, the Health Department), and in the cheesiest possible cop-drama-ish way, too; and with the dawning of that realisation I started to worry that old KK would clam up on me, but he did nothing of the kind. Indeed, he was the very picture of accommodation, as he answered with consummately posh unflappability:
‘Not at all.’
‘Well, first off, er,' I went on, haltingly (as nothing flaps a flapper more efficiently than unflappability itself), 'As I’m something of a newcomer to, ahem, Kernevistani cuisine, I was wondering, vis-à-vis the mabyar kernewek, what its ah…’
‘What the base of the dish is?’
‘In a nutshell, yes.’
‘Chicken. A special breed of the bird directly imported from Kernevistan.’
‘Ah, I see. Excellent.’ (Well, yes, that certainly was excellent. All along, I’d been worried that it would turn out to be a puree of yak’s bollocks, or something equally unsavoury.) ‘And next, I was wondering, vis-à-vis Kernevistan itself, what its, er, precise geographical coordinates were.’
‘Kernevistan is sited on the far, far western frontier of Europe. In all candour, I must tell you that, although the Kernevistanis are a proudly ancient people, with a language and cultural heritage that outstrip those of virtually every other European nationality in point of antiquity, Kernevistan itself, strictly speaking, as a country, with internationally recognized borders and a centralized state, does not, at present, exist.’
‘I see. So, I take it there’s some sort of armed Kernevistani insurgency, funded by Washington or Tehran, that’s due to triumph over its imperial oppressors any day now?’
‘No, not as such.’ Here his phiz took on a troubled, and dare I say it, even a brooding aspect; and, touching me lightly on the sleeve, he motioned me to follow him to a nearby table, the only unoccupied one in the joint by my reckoning.
‘It can scarcely come as a surprise to you, Mr McGyver’ he resumed, in a confidential undertone, once we were seated, ‘that ethnic restaurateuring in London is a punishingly competitive line of work to be in. It’s never been easy for us in this town.’
‘By “us,” I assume you mean “us Kernevistanis”.’
‘No, I mean “us ethnic restaurateurs.” The Italian restaurant is a peculiarly British institution. So wrote Joseph Conrad nearly a hundred years ago. My father, owner of Luna di Parma, one of the finest and most successful Italian trattorie in Islington of the 50s, used sardonically to quote that text every Saturday evening, as he wearily tallied the revenues of the house for the preceding week. Beginning round about 1960, practically without fail, each week's take was smaller than the one before it. He tried to cut corners, of course, as best he could, but by 1971, after he'd been 20 years in the business, there were no more corners to cut: he was obliged to shut up shop and put his family on the dole. It was so...humiliating for all of us...so...' Here he trailed off and pressed a thumb and forefinger to his eyes, being obviously more than a little verstimmt.
'Look, Mr Korin,' I broke in on this mini sob-fest as gently as I could manage, by now worrying less that I would come off sounding like a cop and more that I would come off sounding like Barnet's contender at the next all-England Mr Insensitive Cunt Pageant, 'I'm heartily sorry about what happened to your dad, but I've got someone waiting for me at my table, and I really shouldn't dawdle much longer. Can you please come to the point, the point I thought you were going to make about your affiliation with this place, with Bosty Drog?'
'Yes, of course,' he said, collecting himself and reaching for the napkin at the nearest setting in lieu of a hanky. 'I'm sorry. My point is this: Londoners have always been an insufferably spoilt and jaded lot as far as ethnic cuisine goes, and over the past two decades, their spoiltness and jadedness on this score have been progressing geometrically. As evidence of this tendency, witness my own career in the so-called hospitality industry: my first venture in the family biz, back in 1980, was a small Thai restaurant in Soho. I settled on Thai not because I thought it was particularly trendy, but because I liked the food and had got quite good at preparing it during an apprenticeship year I'd spent at a restaurant in Bangkok. I managed to keep my doors open for about ten years--quite a respectable run, by any standard. In the first half of that decade, which happened to correspond to a period when Thai food was still something of an unknown quantity in London, I made a good bit of money; in the second half, I lost it all and then some.
'At first, I proved much more resilient in the face of failure than my father before me; more resilient and also more prescient--or so I thought at the time. It had been unreasonable of me, I told myself, to expect to turn a profit purveying Thai food, based on the excellence of my kitchen alone, in an era when Thai food had become practically as common as Szechuan Chinese. If I'd had any business smarts, I told myself, I would have shut up shop the moment my first competitor within walking distance had appeared on the scene. I resolved that my next venture would centre around an altogether more obscure ethnic cuisine that would prove more resistant to the vagaries of the market; and so I opened an Ethiopian restaurant. That survived for about five years, and was followed by a Malaysian restaurant, which lasted a mere three. You see what was happening here: the more assiduously I sought to carve out ever-more-obscure culinary ethnic niches, the more briefly I was succeeding in staying ahead of the curve, so to speak, of Londoners' appetite for the new and the exotic.
'When my last genuine ethnic-culinary enterprise, a Malian so-called bistro at King's Cross, went belly-up a day or two shy of its first anniversary, old as I was, I seriously thought about getting out of the business altogether, of going back to university to study for accountancy [!] or some other more stable profession. And so I undoubtedly would have done, if I hadn't been graced, at the last possible moment, by an insight into the absolute futility of the whole cursus I had been pursuing for nearly a quarter of a century, and into the possibility of casting a saving throw that might just allow me to keep my hand in the game without failing yet again on an even more colossal scale, within an even more temporally-straitened horizon. I suddenly realised that in London, statistically speaking, no ethnic restaurant will ever succeed in the long run as long as, at the time of its opening, there is at least one Londoner who has heard of the country or ethnicity for which it purports to be the culinary standard-bearer. If they've heard of the place you hail from, I realised, they can copy you, and once you're no longer the only game in town, you're as good as finished. And from this revelation it was an easy step to the corollary revelation that the only foolproof means of rendering yourself inimitable in the world of ethnic restaurateuring was to set up shop as the purveyor of a cuisine hailing from a nation or a country that did not yet exist.'
'You mean,' I interjected here, 'by preparing and vending the grub of a fictional country--a version of Ruritania?'
'No, no, no, not at all. You misunderstand me. A country that does not yet exist is not at all the same thing as a fictional country. If I invent a country--my own version of Ruritania, as you've just so aptly put it--I transparently set myself up as a fraud, whereas if I posit the existence of a country that may yet come into being, I retain the semblance of authenticity. Hence, according to the second rationale, Kernevistan, hence, six months ago come Monday, the grand opening of Bosty Drog. Oh, I freely admit it's not particularly likely that Kernivstan will ever exist, but I also adamantly insist that it's not absolutely out of the question that it will exist someday. Picture to yourself the following scenario: an Islamic victory in the so-called war on terrorism, leading eventually to the establishment of a benevolent sultanate à la the former Ottoman Empire, with Europe studded from the Urals to the Atlantic by a succession of nominally autonomous Stans, granted to every two-bit self-styled sometime nation as a sop to European pride. It's not, I say again, absolutely out of the question, that such a scenario should prevail, or that Kernevistan should thereby come into its own.'
I have to say I'd rather lost the thread of his argument round about the time he stopped talking about why he'd failed with these earlier joints and started to explain how he'd come up with the idea of opening this one. My allusion to Ruritania had amounted to my last stab at registering comprehension. By now it had dawned on me that he had taken far longer to get to his point than he had earlier taken to digress from it, and that if I was to hold on to the remotest hope of saving this night-out from foundering on the shoals of cold-shoulder-dom, I had best wrap up my convo with Mr Korin here and now, by the most expeditious means possible. And so, rising from the table, I said to him:
'Well, whatever the rationale behind your establishment of the place, I have to say, it appears to be succeeding swimmingly. Congratulations.'
'Thank you. I'm afraid, though, that I am not so sanguine. It was just so, on the surface, at all of my previous ventures, at this point in their life-spans. I'm afraid you've caught me at a bad moment, Mr McGyver. You see, earlier this evening, I was graced by yet another insight--namely, that the very mainsprings of human nature that are attested to so eloquently by the present success of Bosty Drog testify equally eloquently, and by way of this selfsame success, to its imminent failure. I realised tonight, you see, that the same impulse that would lead a person to seek out a restaurant serving up food from a country he has never heard of is exactly consubstantive with the impulse to start up another restaurant serving up food hailing from this same as-yet non-existent country. I realised tonight that, among Londoners--and among people in general--the thirst for the new and the exotic is trumped only by their craven incapacity for admitting that the emperor has no clothes.'
And here he gave one of those high-pitched, hysterical titters that instantly clue you in to the fact that the titterer is missing a few chairs from his front room; and after that, he pressed his fingers to his eyes as before. Given that he now appeared to be, as they say, lost in a world of his own, I gathered I was within the bounds of decorum to take French leave of him, and so I did with all speed (not, though without first giving him a perfunctory 'cheer-up-mate' chuck on the shoulder), returning to the table just in time to catch Sarah making what was obviously not her first incision into her serving of mabyar kernewek. Although I had kept her waiting several times longer than a trip to the gents would have warranted, I still thought it a bit rude of her to have started eating without me, but I let it slide.
'Well, you certainly took your sweet time,' she says, her fork poised half an inch from her mouth.
'Sorry, love. Just having a bit of a chinwag with the owner, Chef Korin himself. The man's absolutely barmy. How's the old MK treating you?'
She thrusts the fork into her mouth, closes her eyes, and, as she's chewing, theatrically flutters the lids of the latter, before replying, a full minute after the posing of my question, in this likewise theatrically hoarse near-whisper, 'Let's just say the description in Time Out was an understatement.'
'Wonderful,' I rejoin gamely. 'I can hardly wait to tuck it into it myself.' I glance down at my plate, which supports a whole chicken small enough to rest comfortably--if it were alive--in the palm of your hand, flecked here and there with bits of green and white that I, not unreasonably, take to be chunklets of the promised rosemary and garlic. So, I cut into the bird, and spear a forkful of its flesh, which I then insert into my salivating maw; and as the flavour and aroma of that first gobful of mabyar kernewek cascades across my palate, it sets off a cluster of associations worthy of the writings of that asthmatic French geezer who lived in a cork-lined room and never went outside: Rosemary and garlic, my mum's recipe for...miniaturised chickens...an ancient language...the far, far western frontier of Europe...the shape of the landmass on the map...kilts...sheiks' gowns (?)...a celebrated dessert from a criminally underrated national cuisine... And subsequently this cluster of associations converges on an emotive focal point of outrage, and, throwing my fork down, I leap to my feet and exclaim:
'Don't you see what this is all about, Sarah? The mabyar kernewek is a cornish hen! The dehen rew is cornish ice cream! And Kernevistan--it's Cornwall! Kernevistan is Cornwall, I tell you, it's Cornwall, don't you get it? And this here restaurant, Bosty Drog, is a fucking dishonest-to-badness Cornish restaurant!'
'What on earth are you talking about?' she barks back at me, visibly stropped. 'And will you please sit down? You're making a pair of spectacles out of us. I don't know how I got it into my head that it'd be worthwhile to come here with you. You provincial types are all the same; none of you appreciate the finer things in life. I once went with a guy, a Norweegian like yourself, who was exactly the same way; I couldn't take him anywhere without causing a scene.'
'Look, Missy,' I retorted. 'The correct pronunciation is Norridgian! For the fucking love of fuck, does my accent really suggest to you that my native tongue is the language of Ibsen? And anyway, it's got fuck all to do with my being from Norwich, you...you council house trollope! It's got fuck all to do with me at all, in fact. This place is the naffest, the ersatziest thing to hit London since Jerry Springer: The Opera, and you know it. You know it as well, as I do, and you'd admit it, too, if you weren't such a rubbishy trend-fucker...'
I cut my tirade short when I notice that my listener's attitude has suddenly done a complete yooey--that from being stropped to the gills, she's suddenly gone to being abashedly amused; that she's put her fork down and is now stifling a giggle with the palm of her right hand. And as a bloke will do when he catches a girl looking at him like he has two schlongs, I did a spot-check of my personal premises to see if anything of the kind was amiss. And lo and behold, from the base of my throat to the waistline of my trousers, in place of the immaculately smooth, white, broadcloth expanse of overshirt that I'd expected to find there, I saw instead an undulating, string-vest-scrimmed expanse of pink, hairy, manflesh. Well, this was a first for me: a totally reflexive, unconscious access of shirtiness. So transported had I just now been by the manifest unconscionability of the whole situation, that my fingers had got to work on my shirt buttons without waiting for my mind to catch up with them.
Right, then, YFC, I say to myself then. Adopt, adapt, and improve. Can't very well take back that 'council-house-trollope' slur in any case, can we? And so, first, grabbing my fork, I plunge it straight up the arsehole of my so-called mabyar, leaving the latter for the moment on the plate; and next I reach in to my pocket and pull out my wallet and fish out a tenner and a twenty, and chuck them on the table in Sarah's general direction. 'That,' I say to her, 'should cover the cost of my meal, and this,' I say, throwing another two ventis after them, 'should cover the cost of your cab fare to Barnet (please don't hesitate to call me if you've forgotten the exact address), and this,' I say, adding a fiver to the whole pile, 'should cover the cost of the fork I'm about to abscond with. Good night, Miss Slother; I'm off.' And so, with cornish hen lolly in hand, I exit the premises, without giving her so much as a nanosecond to put in her next tuppence's worth. Always best to leave 'em wanting more, as some git Yank stand-up comedian once said.
Out on the pavement, I felt a strange feeling of elation--the gorilla-costumed bloke failed to re-descend on to my shoulders, and the just-cold-enough night air felt bracingly pleasant against my nipples. And the cornish hen, which I devoured the better part of before reaching the second cross-street, while clearly not up to my mum's standards, was quite scrumptious--easily the best one I'd had since moving to the capital. At one point, when I was about mid-way to the car, a rasta bloke, leaning against the outer wall of a curry stand, and obviously stoned or pheened out of his gourd, shouted out to me, 'Look who it is--it's Jerry Stringer!' I wanted to rejoin something equally caustic, but there was nothing doing, as I'd expended all of my shirtiness power-points back at the restaurant. The McGyver shirt can come unbuttoned only once in an evening, after which point I have to retire to home base to recharge; in this regard I'm much like Ultraman. On the whole, in any case, I was inclined to see the rasta bloke's accosting of me more as an omen than as a challenge: two Jerry Springer references inside of a quarter of an hour certainly didn't bode well. And so, when I got back to the Mazda I was hardly surprised--shocked, yes, but hardly surprised--to find that the driver's-side window had been smashed in. There was nothing missing from the interior of the car--in fact, the culprit had left a ten-pound note on the seat. Whodathunkit? A conscientious junkie. But, of course, this charitable thought was quickly pushed to the background by a host of more disheartening, and quite frankly, infuriating, positively maddening, thoughts. I could have stayed at home, watching my Tivo replay of the Tottenham-Arsenal game, I said to myself, as I brushed the seat clean of glass fragments with a yellowed ancient copy of the Observer. Instead, I've just wasted three hours of my life in the company of a woman I positively detest, in a place I detested every bit as much, at a cost of upwards of 50 pounds; and, collaterally, got myself another 300 pounds in the hole for repairs on my car. There was, I realized, only one person on this earth at whose doorstep the blame could be laid for the litany of injuries I had suffered tonight. But as I sat parked there in the driver's seat with the hands of my hands pressed to my throbbing temples, I was astonished as the next bloke would have been to feel the name of this selfsame blameworthy individual coursing upwards from my gut and out through my larynx; and afterwards to hear that single protracted monosyllable--
K-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-N!---resonating within the cab of the Mazda at near dog-whistle pitch and smoke-detector volume; and finally to hear the tintinnabulatory bruit of the other, passenger's side window, shattering, from the force of my voice alone, into a million tiny shards. Make that 600 pounds, I said to myself as I revved up the engine and pulled out on to the street. And so, back to Woodside Park, and--after an obligatory nightcap of five bottles of Stella--to bed.
Bosty Drog
17 Hoxton Market
N1 6HG
Shoreditch
020 7793 8221
London's first--and so far, only--Kernevistani restaurant and Shoreditch's best-kept culinary secret. Chef Kadan Korin whips up a mabyar kernewek with rosemary and garlic that's TDAHYCDAQAF (To Die And Have Your Corpse Drawn And Quartered Afterwards For). And don't forget to save some room for a dollop or two of the déhen rew, arguably the most delectable dish in Kernevistan's cornucopcic and criminally underrated national cuisine.
No surprises here, just the usual largely uninfomative hyperbolic backwash of foodcritickese. Well, I'd done my best, intelligence-wise; all I could do now otherwise was to make sure to stow an extra-large bottle of milk of magnesium in the glove compartment of the Mazda (I read 'best-kept culinary secret,' you see, as code for 'sanitation scandal in the making'--it was the only useful bit in the whole capsule). Oh, yeah, while I'm on the subject of the Mazda, I guess I might as well crack open another parenthesis--as I crack open my fourth Stella of the evening--and explain that, during the above-quoted conversation, I had agreed to drive us to the restaurant. Once again, if I'd had my druthers, we would have tubed the trip, as the Drog is sited but a brisk ten-minutes' walk from the Old Street tube station, and that station is a straight shot down the Northern Line from Woodside Park. But Sarah, being a Hertfordshire girl born, bred, and braised, was skittish about riding on the tube, somewhat understandably on account of what went down on 7/7, somewhat less understandably on account of her fear that we might be mugged along the way. I could have explained to her that the odds of our being mugged on the tube were far smaller than our odds of being mugged during our foot-trek from the car to the restaurant, given that any parking space we'd be lucky enough to land would almost certainly be much farther from the restaurant than the tube station was; but, again, for reasons not widely diverging in character from the ones cited above in connection with the choice of venue, I held my piss.
So, just after dusk of the big day, such as it was, I did the old four esses and donned my shorts, string vest, best slacks and button-up, etc., stepping into my Skechers just as the doorbell rang, announcing Sarah's arrival. As we've got a 7:30 reservation and it's coming on to a quarter of seven, I don't invite her in for a spritzer or any other sort of pre-aperatif, as I might have done if we'd had more time, but instead simply close the front door behind me and point to the Mazda--which is parked directly out front--with a sweeping, Z-Z-Top-esque 'Après vous'-type gesture. The drive into town was relatively painless, what with traffic being unusually light by London-nightlife-rush-hour standards. The only real snag was presented by a double-parked lorry at the junction of the East Finchley High Road and Fortis Green, which slowed us down to a sub-pedestrian speed for about ten minutes as we waited for the sub-competent sub-cunts ahead of us to merge into the adjoining lane. If only the conversation had been as unharrowing as the drive. Alas, before we'd even made it to the end of Woodside Avenue, Sarah was subjecting me to the old third-degree. She starts by asking me, 'So what was it that got you interested in pursuing a career in the medical supplies industry in the first place?' which, I don't mind telling you, is just the sort of question to send my fingers scurrying for my top shirt button. I went to university to be an accountant, you see, and as a newly-certified accountant, I simply took the best accountancy job I could find at the first go-round, which job simply happened to be the one I presently hold, as junior accounts receivable associate at Proctologitex, Ltd. If that job had happened to be junior accounts receivable associate at Phocicidex, Ltd, manufacturers of the clubs used for drubbing to death baby seals, I would just as cheerfully have gone to work for Phocicidex, Ltd. The so-called corporate mission of whoever I happen to be working for, you see, is of absolutely no interest to me; and I suspect that all professional accountants feel the same way about the so-called corporate missions of their respective employers. Sarah, on the other hand, as I've already said, works in public relations, in which field it is apparently part of the culture, as they say, both on the clock and off, to pretend you actually give a rancid Arsenal goalkeeper's schphincter about your bosses' ratoinale for their particular line of pound, dollar, and euro-hoovering. And so, naturally (but not in the least understandably), she's a bit put off when I tell her, in five or fewer minutes, more or less all of what I've just told you, gentle reader, about my reasons for working at Proctologitex. Fortunately, I manage to keep the conversation from lapsing into a so-called awkward silence by turning the tables on her, as they say, by asking her what it was that got her so enthused about working in the medical supplies industry, and at Proctologitex specifically, etc.; and her reply to this question keeps her jaw and my ear busy for the remainder of the trip. The gist of her rationale was that ever since she was a wee lass she'd always wanted to help people, and that she could think of nothing more fundamentally helpful to people than proctological technology, and the spreading of the good word thereabout. It sounded like absolute bollocks to me, but then who was I to judge (at least openly)? Anyway, all the while she's jawing, I every now and then, mainly when we're idling at stop lights, get a decent gander at her face from the side, and I can't help finding it a lot less appealing in profile than I found it straight-on the other day. I notice that she's got what I call a classic shark's profile, with a pointy nose and a sharply receding chin, a profile I've never been much of a fan of; not but that any female phiz might not eventually grow on you. The way things were going, though, I doubted this one ever would do.
Parking was a breeze--I snagged a spot on a side street only a couple of hundred metres farther up Old Street than the the tube station itself--and thus, so was the walk to the restaurant. The whole way, I felt as though a 20-stone bloke in a gorilla costume, the personification of stroppiness, had just been helicopter-lifted off my shoulders. Of course, from door to door we had to run a well-staffed gauntlet of junkies, hippies, prostitutes, and assorted other demimondial layabouts, but that hardly sufficed to dampen my spirits (although Sarah seemed a bit fazed by the process), because I'd expected as much in the vicinity of Hoxton, which I knew at firsthand to be one of the dodgier corners of Whoreditch. 'It's at moments like this one,' I mused aloud, 'that you wonder if maybe old Ken Livingstone isn't such a monster after all.' Sarah said she didn't know that he was supposed to be a monster in the first place. Well, there's your fucking Home Counties hothouse flowers for you, I said to myself.
Luckily, the spirit of the evening started to head cooperatively back downhill once we got to the restaurant. First, we learned from the hostess that because we'd shown up two (!) minutes after the time of our reservation, we'd lost our table, and that there'd be a '37-to-54 minute wait' for another one. Ordinarily, in such a situation, I'd have adjourned to the bar, but it turned out that there was no bar up in this piece, and so we had to spend all 58 (!) minutes of the interval shivering in a particularly draughty spot right up against the front door, deprived of the consolation of alcohol. And I certainly could have done with a few pints of Stella (Cor, I would have settled for Miller Light!) by way of fortification against the Slotherian monologic avalanche that I had unwittingly touched off a half-an-hour earlier in the car, and whose progress, presumably, had been only momentarily by checked during our walk by the ambient ropiness of the street scene. She was a veritable dynamo of terminally tedious personal anecdotage centring on such singularly uninspired topics as her dad's lumbago, her mum's bridge club, and her academic itinerary at the execrable University of Luton (or Loserton, as it's known to us East Anglia alumns). More than once towards the end of this so-called conversation, I have to confess, I caught myself tugging at my belt and panning my eyes round the ceiling in search of a rafter that might be sturdy enough to bear the weight of my 10-stone carcass.
Well, eventually, as I've already intimated, they did show us to a table, and during another unconscionably long interval between our being seated and the arrival of our waiter, I had plenty of opportunity for scoping out the place and sizing it up. What struck you immediately was the outlandishness of the costumes of the staff: the blokes were all dressed in these long, flowing gowns with headdresses, exactly like the togs of Arab sheiks, but powder-blue coloured rather than white; whilst the girls wore white silk blouses on top and on bottom, kiltish-looking skirts woven or dyed in this peculiar plaid of dark blue cross-hatched with a shade of off-yellow or chartreuse that made me glad I wasn't an epileptic. As for the architectural layout of the place--well it was impossible to guess from it what part of the world these Kernevistanis hailed from. On the one hand, you might have plausibly called it modern Scandinavian, on the other, you might have just as plausibly called it classic Polynesian. From front to back, and from floor to ceiling, the walls were panelled in horizontally-orientated black wooden beams each about a handspan wide, and the tables and even the benches flanking the tables were made of the same materials. The decor was nonexistent--there were none of the usual gegaws, knick-knacks or trinkets that in such places at least allow you to pin down the geography of the ethnic eponym to a specific continent; Christ, there weren't even any shelves to put such gegaws, knick-knacks or trinkets on, if any had been in the offing. The only remotely ornamental thing in the whole place was what I took to be a map, a four-or-five-square-metre tapestry tacked to the wall opposite us, and simply depicting, in stark black silhouette, a single landmass which I took to be Kernevistan, surmounted by what I took to be the word 'Kernevistan' printed in the fearsome characters of some alphabet I had never seen before, that might have been Armenian or Gallifreyan for all I knew. I couldn't identify the landmass with any country I'd ever seen before, although I did have the uncanny sense that I had seen it before. When you used your imagination, it looked rather like the gnarly arm and hand of some randy old geezer reaching leftwards and downwards to grope the melons of some hapless young maiden. When you didn't use your imagination, of course, it looked more or less like what all satellite's-eye views of all landmasses look like, namely, a stubby, two-dimensional turd.
So, the waiter (i.e., one of the blokes) finally came round, and I ordered a Stella--which I was delighted to see they actually had--and Sarah said she'd 'stick with water' (not a good sign); then I took a look at the menu. It was as I'd suspected: no starter under 15 quid, no main course under 30. Time to submit yet again to the depredations of the old culinary wallet hoover. What was worse, and what I hadn't expected, was that the only parts of the menu printed in Roman characters were the names of the dishes; the descriptions were all in the same Armenian or Gallifreyan script that appeared on the map. For the first--and essentially the last--time that evening I feel a sense of a genuine connection between Sarah and myself; because, you see, to my astonishment, she doesn't know how to read Kernevistani either.
'What are you thinking of having?' I ask her tentatively.
'Well, the mabyar kernewek seems a pretty safe bet.'
'Right. After all, Time Out did say that it was TDAN...'
'TDAHYCDAQAF.'
'Right. Well, I guess I'll have that as well.'
'So then, it's mabyar kernewek for two.' She laughs slightly through a smile that, in spite of all that's preceded it, I can't help but be charmed by, or but laugh and smile back at in my turn. There was a bit of gratitude mixed into that laugh and smile too, I have to admit--gratitude directed less towards her and more towards my lucky Stellas for not having put it into her head to mention starters.
Anyway, at this point, I thought I’d take advantage of the window of good feeling to divulge to her all of my aforementioned disenchantment with the furnishings, décor, etc., but to my chagrin she was not at all of my mind on this subject; to the contrary, the human and inhuman geography of the Drog were, in toto, in her words, ‘simply enchanting.’ The inauguration of a full-fledged sulkfest on my end was staved off only by the timely return of the waiter to take our orders for the main course, and subsequently, by my excusing myself for a pee break (that first bottle of Stella having by then wended its way through my kidneys to my bladder). As I was emerging thereafter from the gents, my eye happened to alight on this one sheik who, in contrast to the rest of the staff, who were all scurrying purposively from one corner of the restaurant to the other with or without trays of food, was sort of sauntering casually plumb ahead as slowly as could be, with his hands folded behind his back; and every now and then he would turn his head equally casually and slowly in one direction or the other as if contemplatively yet interestedly taking in every micrometre of his surroundings. From these details of his carriage, I immediately sussed out that this bloke had to be the owner of the restaurant, and in his unlooked-for apparition I saw an opportunity of getting some questions answered that I never would have dared ask back at the table, in Sarah’s presence. And so, seizing hold fast of this opportunity, and cutting what was, if I do say so myself, a masterly swath through the sea of powder blue and epileptoplaid, I marched straight up to him and introduced myself point-blank, and by name, as one of his customers.
‘Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr McGyver,’ he replied, offering me his hand. 'Kadan Korin, head chef and sole proprietor of Bosty Drog. I hope everything has so far been to your satisfaction this evening.’ His accent was smooth, urbane, and mainline posh; with nothing foreign-sounding about it.
‘It’s been perfect.’ (How, I’ll bet you’re now asking me, could you have said that everything was perfect, given that you hadn’t had a single bite to eat yet? Don’t be so quick to call bullshit on me, Mr or Miss Smarty-Knickers. When was the last time you had a skunk-free bottle of Stella at a restaurant in Shoreditch?) ‘All the same, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.’ As I was speaking this last sentence, I realised it made me come off sounding like a representative of the Law (in this case, by default, the Health Department), and in the cheesiest possible cop-drama-ish way, too; and with the dawning of that realisation I started to worry that old KK would clam up on me, but he did nothing of the kind. Indeed, he was the very picture of accommodation, as he answered with consummately posh unflappability:
‘Not at all.’
‘Well, first off, er,' I went on, haltingly (as nothing flaps a flapper more efficiently than unflappability itself), 'As I’m something of a newcomer to, ahem, Kernevistani cuisine, I was wondering, vis-à-vis the mabyar kernewek, what its ah…’
‘What the base of the dish is?’
‘In a nutshell, yes.’
‘Chicken. A special breed of the bird directly imported from Kernevistan.’
‘Ah, I see. Excellent.’ (Well, yes, that certainly was excellent. All along, I’d been worried that it would turn out to be a puree of yak’s bollocks, or something equally unsavoury.) ‘And next, I was wondering, vis-à-vis Kernevistan itself, what its, er, precise geographical coordinates were.’
‘Kernevistan is sited on the far, far western frontier of Europe. In all candour, I must tell you that, although the Kernevistanis are a proudly ancient people, with a language and cultural heritage that outstrip those of virtually every other European nationality in point of antiquity, Kernevistan itself, strictly speaking, as a country, with internationally recognized borders and a centralized state, does not, at present, exist.’
‘I see. So, I take it there’s some sort of armed Kernevistani insurgency, funded by Washington or Tehran, that’s due to triumph over its imperial oppressors any day now?’
‘No, not as such.’ Here his phiz took on a troubled, and dare I say it, even a brooding aspect; and, touching me lightly on the sleeve, he motioned me to follow him to a nearby table, the only unoccupied one in the joint by my reckoning.
‘It can scarcely come as a surprise to you, Mr McGyver’ he resumed, in a confidential undertone, once we were seated, ‘that ethnic restaurateuring in London is a punishingly competitive line of work to be in. It’s never been easy for us in this town.’
‘By “us,” I assume you mean “us Kernevistanis”.’
‘No, I mean “us ethnic restaurateurs.” The Italian restaurant is a peculiarly British institution. So wrote Joseph Conrad nearly a hundred years ago. My father, owner of Luna di Parma, one of the finest and most successful Italian trattorie in Islington of the 50s, used sardonically to quote that text every Saturday evening, as he wearily tallied the revenues of the house for the preceding week. Beginning round about 1960, practically without fail, each week's take was smaller than the one before it. He tried to cut corners, of course, as best he could, but by 1971, after he'd been 20 years in the business, there were no more corners to cut: he was obliged to shut up shop and put his family on the dole. It was so...humiliating for all of us...so...' Here he trailed off and pressed a thumb and forefinger to his eyes, being obviously more than a little verstimmt.
'Look, Mr Korin,' I broke in on this mini sob-fest as gently as I could manage, by now worrying less that I would come off sounding like a cop and more that I would come off sounding like Barnet's contender at the next all-England Mr Insensitive Cunt Pageant, 'I'm heartily sorry about what happened to your dad, but I've got someone waiting for me at my table, and I really shouldn't dawdle much longer. Can you please come to the point, the point I thought you were going to make about your affiliation with this place, with Bosty Drog?'
'Yes, of course,' he said, collecting himself and reaching for the napkin at the nearest setting in lieu of a hanky. 'I'm sorry. My point is this: Londoners have always been an insufferably spoilt and jaded lot as far as ethnic cuisine goes, and over the past two decades, their spoiltness and jadedness on this score have been progressing geometrically. As evidence of this tendency, witness my own career in the so-called hospitality industry: my first venture in the family biz, back in 1980, was a small Thai restaurant in Soho. I settled on Thai not because I thought it was particularly trendy, but because I liked the food and had got quite good at preparing it during an apprenticeship year I'd spent at a restaurant in Bangkok. I managed to keep my doors open for about ten years--quite a respectable run, by any standard. In the first half of that decade, which happened to correspond to a period when Thai food was still something of an unknown quantity in London, I made a good bit of money; in the second half, I lost it all and then some.
'At first, I proved much more resilient in the face of failure than my father before me; more resilient and also more prescient--or so I thought at the time. It had been unreasonable of me, I told myself, to expect to turn a profit purveying Thai food, based on the excellence of my kitchen alone, in an era when Thai food had become practically as common as Szechuan Chinese. If I'd had any business smarts, I told myself, I would have shut up shop the moment my first competitor within walking distance had appeared on the scene. I resolved that my next venture would centre around an altogether more obscure ethnic cuisine that would prove more resistant to the vagaries of the market; and so I opened an Ethiopian restaurant. That survived for about five years, and was followed by a Malaysian restaurant, which lasted a mere three. You see what was happening here: the more assiduously I sought to carve out ever-more-obscure culinary ethnic niches, the more briefly I was succeeding in staying ahead of the curve, so to speak, of Londoners' appetite for the new and the exotic.
'When my last genuine ethnic-culinary enterprise, a Malian so-called bistro at King's Cross, went belly-up a day or two shy of its first anniversary, old as I was, I seriously thought about getting out of the business altogether, of going back to university to study for accountancy [!] or some other more stable profession. And so I undoubtedly would have done, if I hadn't been graced, at the last possible moment, by an insight into the absolute futility of the whole cursus I had been pursuing for nearly a quarter of a century, and into the possibility of casting a saving throw that might just allow me to keep my hand in the game without failing yet again on an even more colossal scale, within an even more temporally-straitened horizon. I suddenly realised that in London, statistically speaking, no ethnic restaurant will ever succeed in the long run as long as, at the time of its opening, there is at least one Londoner who has heard of the country or ethnicity for which it purports to be the culinary standard-bearer. If they've heard of the place you hail from, I realised, they can copy you, and once you're no longer the only game in town, you're as good as finished. And from this revelation it was an easy step to the corollary revelation that the only foolproof means of rendering yourself inimitable in the world of ethnic restaurateuring was to set up shop as the purveyor of a cuisine hailing from a nation or a country that did not yet exist.'
'You mean,' I interjected here, 'by preparing and vending the grub of a fictional country--a version of Ruritania?'
'No, no, no, not at all. You misunderstand me. A country that does not yet exist is not at all the same thing as a fictional country. If I invent a country--my own version of Ruritania, as you've just so aptly put it--I transparently set myself up as a fraud, whereas if I posit the existence of a country that may yet come into being, I retain the semblance of authenticity. Hence, according to the second rationale, Kernevistan, hence, six months ago come Monday, the grand opening of Bosty Drog. Oh, I freely admit it's not particularly likely that Kernivstan will ever exist, but I also adamantly insist that it's not absolutely out of the question that it will exist someday. Picture to yourself the following scenario: an Islamic victory in the so-called war on terrorism, leading eventually to the establishment of a benevolent sultanate à la the former Ottoman Empire, with Europe studded from the Urals to the Atlantic by a succession of nominally autonomous Stans, granted to every two-bit self-styled sometime nation as a sop to European pride. It's not, I say again, absolutely out of the question, that such a scenario should prevail, or that Kernevistan should thereby come into its own.'
I have to say I'd rather lost the thread of his argument round about the time he stopped talking about why he'd failed with these earlier joints and started to explain how he'd come up with the idea of opening this one. My allusion to Ruritania had amounted to my last stab at registering comprehension. By now it had dawned on me that he had taken far longer to get to his point than he had earlier taken to digress from it, and that if I was to hold on to the remotest hope of saving this night-out from foundering on the shoals of cold-shoulder-dom, I had best wrap up my convo with Mr Korin here and now, by the most expeditious means possible. And so, rising from the table, I said to him:
'Well, whatever the rationale behind your establishment of the place, I have to say, it appears to be succeeding swimmingly. Congratulations.'
'Thank you. I'm afraid, though, that I am not so sanguine. It was just so, on the surface, at all of my previous ventures, at this point in their life-spans. I'm afraid you've caught me at a bad moment, Mr McGyver. You see, earlier this evening, I was graced by yet another insight--namely, that the very mainsprings of human nature that are attested to so eloquently by the present success of Bosty Drog testify equally eloquently, and by way of this selfsame success, to its imminent failure. I realised tonight, you see, that the same impulse that would lead a person to seek out a restaurant serving up food from a country he has never heard of is exactly consubstantive with the impulse to start up another restaurant serving up food hailing from this same as-yet non-existent country. I realised tonight that, among Londoners--and among people in general--the thirst for the new and the exotic is trumped only by their craven incapacity for admitting that the emperor has no clothes.'
And here he gave one of those high-pitched, hysterical titters that instantly clue you in to the fact that the titterer is missing a few chairs from his front room; and after that, he pressed his fingers to his eyes as before. Given that he now appeared to be, as they say, lost in a world of his own, I gathered I was within the bounds of decorum to take French leave of him, and so I did with all speed (not, though without first giving him a perfunctory 'cheer-up-mate' chuck on the shoulder), returning to the table just in time to catch Sarah making what was obviously not her first incision into her serving of mabyar kernewek. Although I had kept her waiting several times longer than a trip to the gents would have warranted, I still thought it a bit rude of her to have started eating without me, but I let it slide.
'Well, you certainly took your sweet time,' she says, her fork poised half an inch from her mouth.
'Sorry, love. Just having a bit of a chinwag with the owner, Chef Korin himself. The man's absolutely barmy. How's the old MK treating you?'
She thrusts the fork into her mouth, closes her eyes, and, as she's chewing, theatrically flutters the lids of the latter, before replying, a full minute after the posing of my question, in this likewise theatrically hoarse near-whisper, 'Let's just say the description in Time Out was an understatement.'
'Wonderful,' I rejoin gamely. 'I can hardly wait to tuck it into it myself.' I glance down at my plate, which supports a whole chicken small enough to rest comfortably--if it were alive--in the palm of your hand, flecked here and there with bits of green and white that I, not unreasonably, take to be chunklets of the promised rosemary and garlic. So, I cut into the bird, and spear a forkful of its flesh, which I then insert into my salivating maw; and as the flavour and aroma of that first gobful of mabyar kernewek cascades across my palate, it sets off a cluster of associations worthy of the writings of that asthmatic French geezer who lived in a cork-lined room and never went outside: Rosemary and garlic, my mum's recipe for...miniaturised chickens...an ancient language...the far, far western frontier of Europe...the shape of the landmass on the map...kilts...sheiks' gowns (?)...a celebrated dessert from a criminally underrated national cuisine... And subsequently this cluster of associations converges on an emotive focal point of outrage, and, throwing my fork down, I leap to my feet and exclaim:
'Don't you see what this is all about, Sarah? The mabyar kernewek is a cornish hen! The dehen rew is cornish ice cream! And Kernevistan--it's Cornwall! Kernevistan is Cornwall, I tell you, it's Cornwall, don't you get it? And this here restaurant, Bosty Drog, is a fucking dishonest-to-badness Cornish restaurant!'
'What on earth are you talking about?' she barks back at me, visibly stropped. 'And will you please sit down? You're making a pair of spectacles out of us. I don't know how I got it into my head that it'd be worthwhile to come here with you. You provincial types are all the same; none of you appreciate the finer things in life. I once went with a guy, a Norweegian like yourself, who was exactly the same way; I couldn't take him anywhere without causing a scene.'
'Look, Missy,' I retorted. 'The correct pronunciation is Norridgian! For the fucking love of fuck, does my accent really suggest to you that my native tongue is the language of Ibsen? And anyway, it's got fuck all to do with my being from Norwich, you...you council house trollope! It's got fuck all to do with me at all, in fact. This place is the naffest, the ersatziest thing to hit London since Jerry Springer: The Opera, and you know it. You know it as well, as I do, and you'd admit it, too, if you weren't such a rubbishy trend-fucker...'
I cut my tirade short when I notice that my listener's attitude has suddenly done a complete yooey--that from being stropped to the gills, she's suddenly gone to being abashedly amused; that she's put her fork down and is now stifling a giggle with the palm of her right hand. And as a bloke will do when he catches a girl looking at him like he has two schlongs, I did a spot-check of my personal premises to see if anything of the kind was amiss. And lo and behold, from the base of my throat to the waistline of my trousers, in place of the immaculately smooth, white, broadcloth expanse of overshirt that I'd expected to find there, I saw instead an undulating, string-vest-scrimmed expanse of pink, hairy, manflesh. Well, this was a first for me: a totally reflexive, unconscious access of shirtiness. So transported had I just now been by the manifest unconscionability of the whole situation, that my fingers had got to work on my shirt buttons without waiting for my mind to catch up with them.
Right, then, YFC, I say to myself then. Adopt, adapt, and improve. Can't very well take back that 'council-house-trollope' slur in any case, can we? And so, first, grabbing my fork, I plunge it straight up the arsehole of my so-called mabyar, leaving the latter for the moment on the plate; and next I reach in to my pocket and pull out my wallet and fish out a tenner and a twenty, and chuck them on the table in Sarah's general direction. 'That,' I say to her, 'should cover the cost of my meal, and this,' I say, throwing another two ventis after them, 'should cover the cost of your cab fare to Barnet (please don't hesitate to call me if you've forgotten the exact address), and this,' I say, adding a fiver to the whole pile, 'should cover the cost of the fork I'm about to abscond with. Good night, Miss Slother; I'm off.' And so, with cornish hen lolly in hand, I exit the premises, without giving her so much as a nanosecond to put in her next tuppence's worth. Always best to leave 'em wanting more, as some git Yank stand-up comedian once said.
Out on the pavement, I felt a strange feeling of elation--the gorilla-costumed bloke failed to re-descend on to my shoulders, and the just-cold-enough night air felt bracingly pleasant against my nipples. And the cornish hen, which I devoured the better part of before reaching the second cross-street, while clearly not up to my mum's standards, was quite scrumptious--easily the best one I'd had since moving to the capital. At one point, when I was about mid-way to the car, a rasta bloke, leaning against the outer wall of a curry stand, and obviously stoned or pheened out of his gourd, shouted out to me, 'Look who it is--it's Jerry Stringer!' I wanted to rejoin something equally caustic, but there was nothing doing, as I'd expended all of my shirtiness power-points back at the restaurant. The McGyver shirt can come unbuttoned only once in an evening, after which point I have to retire to home base to recharge; in this regard I'm much like Ultraman. On the whole, in any case, I was inclined to see the rasta bloke's accosting of me more as an omen than as a challenge: two Jerry Springer references inside of a quarter of an hour certainly didn't bode well. And so, when I got back to the Mazda I was hardly surprised--shocked, yes, but hardly surprised--to find that the driver's-side window had been smashed in. There was nothing missing from the interior of the car--in fact, the culprit had left a ten-pound note on the seat. Whodathunkit? A conscientious junkie. But, of course, this charitable thought was quickly pushed to the background by a host of more disheartening, and quite frankly, infuriating, positively maddening, thoughts. I could have stayed at home, watching my Tivo replay of the Tottenham-Arsenal game, I said to myself, as I brushed the seat clean of glass fragments with a yellowed ancient copy of the Observer. Instead, I've just wasted three hours of my life in the company of a woman I positively detest, in a place I detested every bit as much, at a cost of upwards of 50 pounds; and, collaterally, got myself another 300 pounds in the hole for repairs on my car. There was, I realized, only one person on this earth at whose doorstep the blame could be laid for the litany of injuries I had suffered tonight. But as I sat parked there in the driver's seat with the hands of my hands pressed to my throbbing temples, I was astonished as the next bloke would have been to feel the name of this selfsame blameworthy individual coursing upwards from my gut and out through my larynx; and afterwards to hear that single protracted monosyllable--
K-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-N!---resonating within the cab of the Mazda at near dog-whistle pitch and smoke-detector volume; and finally to hear the tintinnabulatory bruit of the other, passenger's side window, shattering, from the force of my voice alone, into a million tiny shards. Make that 600 pounds, I said to myself as I revved up the engine and pulled out on to the street. And so, back to Woodside Park, and--after an obligatory nightcap of five bottles of Stella--to bed.
Labels: Ken Livingstone, Kernevistan, Proctologitex, Sarah Slother
posted by Rugby McGyver | 8:23 pm
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