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Oct 23, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Margaret Mitchell
Looks Delicious! Exploring Japan’s food replica cultureJapan House, until 16 February 2025 There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with objects and must guess if they’re edible or not. Is that a dish sponge – or a steamed sponge cake?
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Margaret Mitchell
There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with objects and must guess if they’re edible or not. Is that a dish sponge – or a steamed sponge cake? I might not consider afternoon tea to be art, but the confectionery artifice required to dupe contestants into mistaking the replica for reality is impressive – or at least entertaining.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
aarp.org | Margaret Mitchell
Paul Spella (Getty, 3) Facebook Twitter LinkedIn When I moved from America to Britain for college, I expected the experience to be like a sleepaway trip to my grandparents’ house: a bit damp and dusty with age, charming if slightly haunted, the meals somewhat reminiscent of an era of wartime rationing, but on the whole familiar. Like an extension of home, even.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Margaret Mitchell
Text size Line Spacing Comments Share Share Margaret Mitchell The tyranny of the restaurant booking system Linkedin Messenger Email Last week, the London restaurant St John opened reservations for a celebration of its 30th birthday. For much of September, the Smithfield restaurant will bring back its 1994 menu at 1994 prices. Tables were snatched up within minutes, possibly seconds. I sat at my computer refreshing the OpenTable booking site like a monkey at a slot machine and got nothing but...
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Margaret Mitchell
Text size Line Spacing Comments Share Share Margaret Mitchell Japan is great, but it defeated me Linkedin Messenger Email It’s great having toilets with warm seats that shoot water up your bum until you need somewhere to throw up. I was leaning over a hotel loo in Osaka and all I wanted was to rest my clammy forehead on a cold plastic seat. Six hours earlier, I had watched a man carve up a metre-long bluefin tuna on Dotonbori Street. It appeared very much still alive, apart from the limp way...
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Bertie Brandes |Margaret Mitchell |Jimmy McIntosh
Why are women no longer having sex? You’ve already picked up this magazine, so it’s clear you fancy yourself as something of a non-conformist. Perhaps you think you know what it feels like to exist in the shadowy outskirts of society. But I am here to out myself as a member of a community so taboo it doesn’t even have a representational hashtag, let alone a Barclays Pride float.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Margaret Mitchell |Jimmy McIntosh |Margaret McCartney
We ask some more stupid questions to one half of Rizzle Kicks. We could not be clearer about the terms of this challenge: 146 questions, 146 seconds – no gimmicks, no softballs, just a timer and some silly propositions. Eighteen-stone goal machine, Adebayo Akinfenwa, got through ten; millennial everywoman, Dolly Alderton, set a new record with twelve. Who fancies their chances this time around?
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Jul 17, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Roisin Lanigan |Margaret Mitchell |Jimmy McIntosh |Margaret McCartney
Truly the people’s café. It was a frigid, grey January morning in 1989 when Abdul Basit made the chance celebrity sighting that would change his life. The story of how it happened has been repeated so many times in the years since that it’s become a legend in itself. He was preparing to begin another unremarkable day, getting ready to launch his new business, an unassuming little café tucked away in that part of west London where Notting Hill meets Bayswater Road.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Margaret Mitchell |John Phipps |Andrew Murray |Richard Smyth
Learning the secret of eternal life. Ciro Orsini has a charming gap in his teeth, which makes it possible to recognise him in the celebrity photos covering the walls of his Knightsbridge institution. Ciro’s Pomodoro is a pizza joint that’s been running for 46 years on Beauchamp Place.
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Jul 9, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Margaret Mitchell
Text size Line Spacing Comments Share Share Margaret Mitchell Spanish food is deliciously obsessed with death Linkedin Messenger Email The moral absolutist in me believes that in every city, with its finite number of restaurants, there is such a thing as the best of all possible lunches. I don’t have to find it, but I have to get close. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. In fact, on holiday, the idea of wasting a meal on mere ‘mediocre’ fills me with crippling guilt over wasting not just money but...
