I think I’ve put on half a stone. I’m not actually sure, because I don’t own a pair of scales. If I ever do weigh myself — in a hotel, a rural German railway station or at the butchers — they’re always different calibrations. I’m 200 somethings and then, next time, I’m 15,000, or three minutes past 12. My waistband is my true Plimsoll line, and I assume that half an inch is about 10 bob, or a baker’s dozen, or 13 degrees.
Anyway, I’ve just reached the outer limits of my tailor’s tolerance and the Blonde is giggling that she can pinch a cubit. All by spending a week in America. America just clings to you. It used to be said that you could eat very well in England, just as long as you ate breakfast three times a day. It’s not true here any more, but it is in America. Breakfast is a majestic thing, so complex that most Americans have to go out to eat it rather than attempt it in their own kitchens. It’s best in cheap diners.
In Blighty, the full English means only one thing — or one collection of things. But in America, breakfast has more options than a Nevada brothel. The children and I went to the Candy Kitchen every morning, and they’d stare with shock and awe at the cornucopia of waffles, omelettes, pancakes, french toast, hot sandwiches, bagels, muffins, pastries, coffee cakes (not made with coffee, but for coffee), oatmeal, smoked fish, potatoes, porky bits, ironed bacon and eggorama. Not to mention the juices and variations on a theme of coffee.
There is something properly egalitarian about American breakfast. Anyone from the Mexican delivery boy to the industrial Gorgon and his fifth wife sit in the same plastic booths and eat with the same concentrated appetite. It’s a big, generous, can-do start to the day, sweet and unctuously bounteous, taking on fuel for the honest travail of building a righteous society. It says every dawn is a new beginning and the day will be what you choose to make of it. And you’ve got to love a country that allows you to have ice cream first thing.
If you’re going to America this summer, you might like to try a game we played that was, I think, invented by Jeremy Clarkson’s handler, Andy Wilman: you have to order an entire breakfast without ever prompting a question. It’s surprisingly hard. Every choice spawns options, like edible malaria. Toast is wholewheat or white, buttered or dry, real butter or low fat, jelly or honey. My kids got very good at it.
Of course, the truth about American breakfast is that its sense of democratic, free-market choice is illusory. The bewildering alternatives of coffee are all still just bad, weak coffee, and the rest is mostly delicious variations of flour, fat and sugar. (Not that that’s a bad thing: flour, fat and sugar are the three refined graces of gastronomy — big lasses with generous asses.)
I wrote about the illusion of choice a couple of weeks ago and had a gush of response, particularly from those in the trade. I bumped into Alastair Little, past master of the influential restaurant, who now writes, teaches and runs a good little deli, Tavola, on Westbourne Grove. He says that he’d always thought that a kitchen should have a hundred ingredients and that, from those, you could cook everything. This doesn’t include fresh produce — meat, fish, veg, bread — just larder stuff that you must always have. I think he’s probably right: 150 is showing off; 80 is parsimony and a furry tongue.
I’ve been making my list and I’d be interested to know what you think. Write and tell me; we’ll make up the definitive larder. It would be rather a generous housewarming present, or beginning-of-term helping hand for a potentially gay student. And it might be interesting to see how different it is from, say, 100 years ago. Soy sauce, perhaps, but no cream of tartare. Suggestions on a postcard to Style, please.
Anyway, this week’s restaurant is Roka, a metro-Jap room from Rainer Becker, the man who brought you the effortfully fashionable Zuma. It’s in Charlotte Street, which is now a foodie bazaar for media folk and, therefore, to be avoided unless you a) have a treatment for a new reality show involving 12 couples competing for bone marrow for their kid’s operation; b) have the script of a cool Brit movie where Keira Knightley kills Ray Winstone and then has her clothes stolen by that bird who’s being larded by Jude Law; or c) are a typhus carrier.
Roka means something esoteric in Japanese, like “the smell of old sunlight” or “I’ve got Keira Knightley’s underwear”. The place has been rather nicely, but unobtrusively, decorated. So often, Japanese restaurants look like Okinawa Ikea, but this one is warm and functional, with a central pit where you can watch the chefs prestidigitate. There’s some sort of trendy bar-club deal downstairs. On your behalf, I declined membership and a lifetime ’s supply of beetroot martinis.
Considering they’re so neat and efficient at preparing food, it’s passing odd that the Japanese are such klutzes when it comes to menus. They always need explaining, and you either get a waitress who understands the menu perfectly, but English fitfully, or you get someone who has marvellous syntax, but is really just a delivery system. I cut out the middleman and ordered everything. And, I must say, as someone who is often ambivalent about weird haiku gannet bites, that this was really rather good. Indeed, their natural propensity to turn everything into a frog’s hat or edible origami had been fiercely resisted — it was all just put neatly and elegantly on plates.
Now, I know that you’re all waiting with buckteeth for me to make this live for you and give you pointers to the good bits. But you know how it is with Japanese nosh: it tends to be either all lovely or all cat food, and the dishes melted into a wasabi-fume dream. I think some kimchi was poignant and properly aggressive, like eating wrinkly old Korean swearwords, and the udon noodles were noodly and wormish. But the speciality of hotpot rice with crab was too foreign for everyone except me — I liked it because it was like risotto that was being held to ransom by yakuza shellfish.
The prices are deceptively mixed and, like the flavours, they all seem to end up as one thing — more than you earned today. But I liked Roka. I would certainly go again and our guest, Emeric, the movie mogul, looked around gloomily and said he was very impressed and that he’d be using it for business lunches. So there goes the atmosphere.
