Comfort Food

I met Lisa at a Belle & Sebastian concert at the Brixton Academy in the July of 2002. She approached me and informed me that although she hated my shoes, she liked my khaki messenger bag and had an overwhelming urge to make me butternut squash soup. This was reasonable enough, I thought, and continued to converse with her throughout the evening. Lisa was suspicious of mobiles at the time, so I wrote my number on my ticket stub using Katey’s eyeliner pencil. Lisa was from Toronto and had only been in the UK for around a week. 2 days after the show I received a telephone call from her. During this telephone conversation she explained to me that she’d had some of her money stolen. With my faith in humanity, I immediately suspected she was trying to swindle me. I feared that she was going to ask to borrow money from me and then immediately jump the next flight back to Canada to spend it on drugs and alcohol, leaving me so destitute that I'd have to resort to living in a bus shelter and sucking cock for packets of crisps. I listened intently to her story with a skeptical ear and then told her if she needed any help to let me know.

As it transpired Lisa only required someone to relate her story to and over the next few weeks we developed an important and meaningful relationship. The main thing I liked about Lisa was her brute honesty. At first I found it a little odd that someone who was so critical of my actions would continue to call me wanting to hang out, however I soon discovered that this actually aided me in become a more socially competent person. Regardless (or possibly because) of my faults and idiosyncrasies, Lisa still enjoyed my company. This enabled me to converse freely with her without any façade or pretense. Of course, Lisa would be quick inform me precisely what my problems were, yet for some reason it had no effect on her fondness of me.

As winter approached we devised a plan to have a "standing date". Every Wednesday we would meet up and go for a meal. Lisa was a vegan and I was a vegetarian with a severe phobia towards dairy products that expressed itself in absolute hysterical panic should anything either white or yellow come within 5 metres of me. I mean, seriously, anyone who grew up with dogs will confirm that melted parmesan cheese smells exactly like dog diarrhoea. How people eat that shit is beyond me. So it was of extreme relief for me to find someone whose culinary predilections matched my own, and with these inclinations in mind the most obvious cuisine for us to choose was Indian.

Anyone familiar with the demographics of the restaurant industry in the UK will note that for all the Sikhs one may see or Urdu speakers one my hear on the streets of the country, the majority of those who run sub-continental restaurants are Bengali. If one wants to enjoy the dairy-heavy "delights" of Punjabi food, or share in the Kashmiris fondness for nuts and dried fruit, or even if you have a hankering for the coconut milk based and predominantly vegetarian fare found in Kerala, you are going to have a limited options. However, if you like seafood or crave the lentils and pulses common in Bengali cuisine then there is one place where you will find this food in abundance, Brick Lane.

As obvious a choice as Brick Lane was, Lisa and I had a plan. Each Wednesday we would go to the street, to a different restaurant each time, yet order the exact same two dishes. Then we would rate each restaurant according to how well these dishes were prepared. The two dishes that we ordered were Sag Aloo and Channa Masala. Beside dahl, these two dishes are stables of the vegetable selections in most Bengali restaurants. If a restaurant prepares excellent Sag Aloo and Channa Masala then you know that it is a quality establishment.

There is nothing more impressive than someone who knows a good restaurant. Both Lisa and I were well aware of this and were determined to add this knowledge to our list of skills. As we were both foreigners we felt it would be highly regarded if we had a familiarity with The Capital's premier sub-continental culinary precinct. You never know who may have arrived in London from our countries of birth, looking for us to take them out for a quality meal. Having the expertise equal to or greater than a local would command considerable respect.

Every time I eat at a restaurant with someone or a group of people, and this especially applies to food like Indian which is predominantly shared, I feel a great unease that my culinary peculiarities are limiting the choices of my dinning companions. I worry that these people secretly resent me for my tastes and harbour a desire to cease from eating in my presence. The fact that I didn't have to worry about upsetting Lisa with my predilections was very much a relief. To add to this, for someone like myself who feels perpetually lacking in human contact, to know that every Wednesday evening I would be able to eat a meal with someone whose company I enjoyed and whose palate I shared was something that consoled me greatly. It made me feel that for at least one day a week I had a comfortable social outlet, something that even to this day I have yet to regain.