Pasghetti & Momatoes: What you’re getting yourself in for
What it says on the tin: A sublime selection of sardines at Le Marche du Quartier (and me getting in the way)
At some point in my teens, my mum told me quite firmly that I “couldn’t eat gourmet meals every day”.
I was probably being a difficult little prick at the time, turning my nose up at the offer of a cheese sandwich to embark on an ill-advised egg fried rice endeavour, flavoured with a precisely engineered dressing of tomato ketchup mixed with half a bottle of olive oil. I probably also rolled my eyes, and ignored her.
But it stuck with me. “Why not?”, I thought. Setting aside the obvious confines of budget (which, as a teenager, limited me to whatever I hoped mum wouldn’t notice going missing from the fridge), why couldn’t I eat exciting food every day? Why did I have to eat cheese sandwiches, rather than finding out what happened when I put every leftover I could find (along with a condiment or four) into a frying pan?
Naturally, my mum was right. There is untold joy to be found in beans on toast on a cold day, and being perpetually in your overdraft (and without your parents’ fridge to raid) does limit one’s “gourmet” capabilities. My mum also makes excellent sandwiches, so I was definitely just being a little prick.
What I do maintain to this day, however, is that life is too damn short to eat boring food: that trying something new is always better than eating something you’ve had before that was just, you know, ok.
In a delayed act of teenage rebellion, I’ve made a career out of trying to eat gourmet meals every day. I’ve been absurdly lucky, having wiggled an actual job writing about restaurants at the Evening Standard, which I enjoyed for three wonderful, indigestion-filled years. That job may have lost me an entire wardrobe of size 8-10 clothing, but what I gained was worth so much more.
I’ve tasted countless incredible things made by incredible people who make it their life’s work to turn fuel into art – or, at least, into little plated celebrations of living for the goddamn fun of it. I’ve learnt that there is just so much food in the world, and that it signifies so many things – culture, family, love, painful memories as well as good ones – to each and every person on the planet.
La Tua Pasta tagliatelle is lovely, I am not.
As I’m clearly not going to forget about any of this anytime soon, I’ve started up Pasghetti & Momatoes. The name is a homage to The Simpsons episode in which Homer blags his way to a job as a food critic at the local newspaper. His first review is panned by his editor (riddled with the aforementioned spelling mistakes and repeated use of the phrase “Screw Flanders” to hit the required 500 words), and the whole episode is joyous, ridiculous and worryingly relatable.
Pasghetti & Momatoes will not be me handing out tips on how to make flawless pastry or posing candidly in front of a cafe that cares more about its foliage than it does its food. It will be me getting tomato sauce down my new white jumper, and shouting as loudly as I can about how clever other people are, how good they are at making food and why you should go and eat it.
Without mentioning the C-word, the hospitality industry has had an absolute shitter this year (sorry for the language, but it really fucking has). We’ll talk about that every now and then, but we’ll mainly talk about how remarkable the people who work in it are, and how their passion for feeding others isn’t going anywhere.
None of us really know what’s around the corner in the food and drink world right now, so it’s hard to say what’s going to end up on this page in the next few months. So far I anticipate hot tips on the people and places doing amazingly innovative things in the industry, new openings you should hotstep it down to, and me trying to not to do total injustice to a DIY restaurant kit.
So get in loser, we’re going eating. Homer’s early reviews were so unanimously positive that everyone in Springfield started eating out more and got kinda fat. I like that bit.
