There was a point in my life that I was nearly positive I was going to move to London.
I had made a five-year plan–I’ve made lots of five-year plans, but this one felt pretty real at the time. It was before I had moved to France… before I had even considered moving to France, but there it was on the sheet of paper I had printed out: finish university in Toronto, move to London to go to the London School of Journalism, and then I was going to live in Ealing and work for an editing house. It was the perfect plan.
Needless to say, I didn’t move to London. I moved to Cannes instead, and then to Paris, which turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Still, the fact that I almost moved there, at least in my head, means that going back is always an interesting experience… especially now that two of my best friends–Emese and the English One–live there (to be fair, the English One actually lives in Milton Keynes, but he always comes down to London when I come for a visit.)
The CYF, the English One and I were all at Toronto together, so it only seemed right that we end our British adventure with a stopover in London, where I had my first encounter with meat pies.
Mother Mash is a restaurant that Emese found–Emese always manages to find the best places. This one had a mix-and-match menu of mash, meat pies and gravy that had all of us digging in with zeal. I went with steak pie and colcannon mash, which seemed appropriate considering the comparatively small amount of Irish cuisine I had tried over the past week.
The next night, we decided to make our own dinner; for a change, I didn’t cook a thing, and instead let Emese show off her newly acquired Australian Vegemite stew-making skills. As we sat around her apartment digging into stew and sipping Strongbow, I had a small glimpse of what it might have been like to move to London: it was almost like when we lived in Paris together, our usual wine replaced with cider, bowls of stew instead of the baguette and cheese we used to eat. I liked it… it wasn’t Paris, but I liked it all the same.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the dinner I would eat the next night: it was nothing like what I would have had had I lived in London, especially not now, when I’ve spent all my money on gas and Magners. The Sous-Chef’s father had sent me an e-mail letting me know that he and the Sous-Chef would be in London at the same time I was there, and they wanted to treat me to dinner so that I could meet a winemaking friend of theirs. Considering the fact that a) The Sous-Chef is one of my favorite people, b) The dinners I usually have with the Sous-Chef’s father are fairly epic, and c) I’ll jump on any opportunity to meet someone in the wine business, I found myself ambling down confusing London streets in an unfamiliar neighborhood until I finally stumbled upon the restaurant (with the help of a very nice Englishman).
The restaurant, in case you were wondering, was Gordon Ramsey’s Petrus. Feel free to get jealous now. We didn’t even look at the menu–the Sous-Chef’s father ordered us all the tasting menu, and I squirmed in my seat as courses arrived: brothy tomato soup as an amuse bouche, perfect foie gras, tender scallops, rich lamb and a dessert that had us all in awe: a chocolate sphere with chocolate sauce that forced it to melt over the scoop of vanilla ice cream it surrounded.
As I strolled back through the streets, vaguely recognizing the way that I had come, I wondered again what it would have been like to have lived here… but I didn’t let myself dream about it too long. While I was happy to see Emese and the English One–and happy with the vast spectrum of culinary experiences I had–I had better things to look forward to: it was almost time to go home to Paziols.
Mother Mash
107 Leadenhall Street
Petrus
1 Kinnerton Street