My cooking year: October
Let’s keep it simple... Please!
Eating out is one of life’s greatest pleasures for columnist Debora Robertson. She’s an easy-going sort of person, but she has a warning for restaurant kitchens: stop messing with her dinner – it’s not going to end well for anybody
FOOD STYLING: EMILY GUSSIN
Debora’s reassuringly unfussy soup with walnut pesto
FOOD PHOTOGRAPH: INDIA WHILEY-MORTON.
I thought I’d seen it all. And frankly, I thought we were better people now, after the bad old days of the 2010s. Remember then? When eating out was all square plates and slates, the latter designed to set nerves jangling as cutlery scraped across them, as soothing as an angle grinder on a Sunday morning. We had the mini wire baskets, or even little shopping trolleys, for chips, things with gravy served sloppily on chopping boards, and salad dressing served in pipettes, bestowing on dinner all the easy charm of a lab experiment.
There was the restaurant in York that served bread in cloth caps and the wine waiters were whippets. Fine, I made the last bit up, but it only didn’t happen because they didn’t think of it first. Then there was the London restaurant that really did (notoriously) serve a dish called Sex on the Beach, which comprised mushroom ‘sand’ upon which was draped a used ‘condom’ made from tapioca filled with honey. How clever, how witty I guess – perhaps not so much now when our real beaches are, well, you know.