London eats the world, burps, pays

[imomus]

London. To minimize the culture shock -- this is a city that offers the best of everything on condition that you think the worst of everyone, by which I mean it's misanthropic-logistical-imperial-managerial -- we're eating only Japanese food, though Hisae's love of the English fried breakfast will shortly prevail.



Thursday lunch happens at one of my favourite London places, a Japanese cafe on Brick Lane (opposite the bagel bakeries) called Bodhi Gallery. It's a for-love-not-money type of place, which is to say very un-London, despite being one of London's best people-watching sites. The man who runs it is super-nice. He's waiting on the doorstep when we arrive, unable to open because his food hasn't been delivered yet. When we come back twenty minutes later he's thrown the cafe front open, flooding the interior with sunshine. There's still no hot food, but you can sip matcha shakes and eat edamame and pick at a sushi box (under a fiver, in stark contrast to the £12 lunch dishes being offered at the high-concept Swedish diner over the road).



Bodhi is a delightful place to be. There's free wifi, illustration-like art on the walls, quirky Okinawa folk music playing, and a kind of Street Peeper flow of visually- interesting people on the almost traffic-free street outside. I suppose it might be more typically Londonish than I'm willing to own, because the secret of London is finding some kind of humane and liveable niche in a city which is organised around the principle of binding the world backwards over a barrel and frisking it for cash.

Dinner was at Abeno, which has branches near the British Museum and opposite the Photographer's Gallery in Covent Garden. The man who started it is from the Osaka district of Abeno, which happens to be where Hisae is from too. We've often eaten okonomiyaki -- the popular Japanese seafood omelette -- at hot little shops near Tennoji station. A filling dish costs about £2.50. Here in London, served in high concept, high rent "design" surroundings, it's £12. An Englishman fluent in Japanese cooks it on the hotplate built into the counter. "Hi guys," he says, "have you eaten here before?" (Everyone in Britain uses this "Hi guys" formula these days. Even the ticket inspector on the train is like "Hi guys, I need to see your tickets.")



Abeno's okonomiyaki is to 2008 what sushi was to 1986; a Japanese gimmick, a trend with a premium price, no matter how humble its origins. (The contrast with the cheap, modest okonomiyaki shop I found in Vienna couldn't be greater). But, if you're prepared to be scalped at billtime, Abeno is excellent. Fishflakes flutter atop delicious tofu, the salad sauce is great, the okonomiyaki piping hot and delicious. They even have my favourite beer, Asahi Kuro Nama, similar to Erdinger schwarz weissbier, but, here, six times the price. Global evil has global rewards, and naturally they cost the earth.

Comments

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

...the secret of London is finding some kind of humane and liveable niche in a city which is organised around the principle of binding the world backwards over a barrel and frisking it for cash.

This is true. But aren't New York, Dubai and Tokyo also designed with worldwide exploitation in mind?

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

now HOLD STILL WHILE I GAS YOU

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

Look out for the campy drawing of Queen Victoria!



Or Amy Winehouse!

Youtube search on "british teeth" has resulted in my being busy for the next week trying to find the best vid out of all of them.

X-treme close up - Bowie's choppas

[nancerina.livejournal.com]

Re: X-treme close up - Bowie's choppas

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

There's an entry, in this encyclopaedia of everything shit, on Bowie's teeth:

http://www.iseverythingshit.co.uk/index.htm

Bowie's teeth after correction, that is. Have to say, I agree here. I wonder if I am now living in a world where I'm in a minority.

Re: X-treme close up - Bowie's choppas

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

That should have been just the word 'after' in italics.

[(Anonymous)]

Tony Parsons recently questioned if anyone would cheer for Andy Murray at this year's Wimbledon. As a Scot who 'hates the English' he can hardly have an army of fans south of the border. Is there a sliver of this sentiment in your hatred of London? Would you deem Murray's prize money be evil and inflated, if he won?

(Trying to find some devil's advocacy here - I agree, London is not really liveable at a human scale. It is now designed for throughput, as if by corporate modellers, and often by people who don't live here: slash-and-burn City workers commuting from Hertfordshire, buy-to-let landlords snoozing on a beach).

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> It is now designed for throughput

Blimey, that sounds about right. It's a capitalist-designed wealth-generating machine with people as an input in the most literal way. A third of London's residents weren't born there; most of the buy-to-let landlords live elsewhere. Ironically, the rich people who do actually live in London are "non-domiciled" for tax reasons.

I suppose I can't complain - it's pretty much the only thing keeping Britain solvent.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe Gordon is orchestrating a massive de-inflation of the housing market covertly. A necessary thing but, if performed openly, it would lose him even more voters that he's losing already. Maybe his legacy won't be hostile, more Christ-like and Machiavellian.

(Yes, I realise this conspiracy theory is fishier than a fistful of okonomiyaki flakes).

[(Anonymous)]

Murray's issue is with his inside-out forehand to the opposite side. I think you're going to see him exploit Malisse's backhand, and set him up with a winner down the line. He's also been working on his net game and adjusting his service motion.

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't he convinced that matches are fixed? (The ones he loses, I presume. There's probably a name for that kind of selective paranoia, and a PhD thesis tying it to post-colonialism and Jacques Lacan's 'objet petit a').

[(Anonymous)]

(Another conspiracy theory which doesn't add up, as it takes at least two to match-fix.)

[badspelling.livejournal.com]

i hate London - it has beaten all the constructive arguments out of me.

Momus eats London, farts, doesn't pay...

[helmut-zeit.livejournal.com]

or did you... pay?
either way, this post reads like a list of hang ups...

like

[(Anonymous)]

hearing "hi guys" in london can not be half as weird as it is to see a british person write "is like" instead of "said".

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

this is a city that offers the best of everything on condition that you think the worst of everyone

I have to acknowledge a magnificent rhetorical flourish when I see one.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

"Hi guys" may sound something culled from the American service sector, but in my experience the rule here is more a singsong "Helloo" (female) or "Can I help you, sir?" (male)

But then, I haven't been to a TGI Friday's in twenty years.

[(Anonymous)]

You don't know what you're missing.

FRIDAY'S (R) THREE-FOR-ALL is Friday's big-enough-to-share platter which featuers a trio of their most famous appetizers: Loaded Potato Skins, Fried Mozzarella and their spicy Buffalo Wings, complete with sour cream and green onions, marinara sauce and celery sticks with Blue Cheese dressing.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I'll bring the flair!

[nancerina.livejournal.com]

Never will forget in SoCal (Coronado to be exact) during the 90's at Hotel Le Meridien - young dudette at the front desk while checking in two elderly ladies: "Ok guys..." - and have a nice day!.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Eesh.

I haven't been to a TGI Friday's

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Neither have I but no guilt. Visiting home turf can be a critical experience. I wonder how Aussies are doing it.

[(Anonymous)]

There was a short-lived Polish restaurant in N19 where the bleached blonde proprietress actually sat in the window, calling "Come in. Don't be shy. Polish food. Very cheap. You like. Don't be shy. Very cheap." She didn't realise that people eat out for a dining experience and not necessarily because it's cheap. I felt like telling her to get some Andrzej Wajda, Walerian Borowczyk or Kieślowski film posters on the walls.

[(Anonymous)]

Okonomiyaki in Venice? Not Vienna?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well spotted, I meant Vienna.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up about Bodhi. I'll have to check it out.

A major problem with London, IMHO, is that it doesn't have a cafe culture. Here, it's all pubs, and the only reason people go to cafes is if they have small children in tow (hence cafes here are watering holes for upwardly-mobile "yummy-mummies" with designer prams and Cath Kidston handbags, or else woeful McWorld parodies of cafes like Caffe Nero or Costa Coffee). Though while pubs are the main social hubs here, they are also centred around alcohol, which in England has magic disinhibiting properties, and thus have a rowdier atmosphere than cafes; not the sort of place to sit with a laptop/notebook and write/draw whilst people-watching.

[(Anonymous)]

I love London, but this is exactly right. Especially unforgivable in the the pleasant summer months..

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Having said that, there's a part-Japanese-run art space named Cafe Oto (http://www.cafeoto.co.uk) which has recently opened in Dalston. Do you know of it?

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

I've never really quite grasped how Abeno can charge quite so much for an okonomiyaki that isn't exactly piled high with premium ingredients (scallop, oyster, what-have-you). It's reasonably tasty, but when I tell people here in Osaka (where I am currently) that London's sole okonomiyaki chain charges around ¥2,000 at entry level, astounded guffaws resound.

You might (or might not!) be interested to know that the unit price for your basic buta-tama okonomiyaki here is around ¥120, so a bog (!) standard ¥500 charge is a four-fold increase. I presume Abeno's margins are the same or even higher, but the rent must be fairly punishing given the location. Bodhi feels generous and welcoming, Abeno feels rather stingy and restrained and those wooden benches don't encourage you to linger.

(And having spent this week studying at Osaka's specialist okonomiyaki cooking school, Abeno really could show a bit more imagination with their sauce application. Grumble, grumble...)

There's a nice little cafe called Kimagure on Farringdon Road, just by Mount Pleasant, and it would be nice to see more of these personal and local places opening up in time.

[spaglet.livejournal.com]

I managed to entirely miss this in favour of Aki, parallel on Grays Inn Road, despite walking the area a lot recently... thanks!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We walked over to check it out, and it was shut. But it looked a little underwhelming, to be honest.

[spaglet.livejournal.com]

Well, they aren't cheap - their prices are in keeping with the area - but they do rice bowls for a fiver. This is what caught my eye, at 5am, several mornings in a row on my way home from work.

(Assuming you're meaning Aki, here, not Kimagure!)

[(Anonymous)]

All the London artists and musicians I know call your favourite London street Prick Lane. The place is a joke Momus.

[(Anonymous)]

kind of Street Peeper flow of visually- interesting people

I've never seen the point of that Street Peeper site.

[actuallynotgay.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for a cheap, authentic Japanese restaurant in London, you should really try Asakusa in Mornington Crescent.

http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/reviews/895.html