Kurz & Lang, Smithfield

1st February 2008

I miss Berlin. I’ve been back two and a half weeks. I’ve been in a new job for two. My friends are still there, drinking too much beer and eating a lot of kebabs. It’s hard not to feel like I’m missing out. While I was there we stuck to a diet of salami sandwiches for lunch and kebabs on the way home. Normally I’m not much of a kebab fan – sometimes, if it’s really necessary, then a chicken shish will suffice, but doner? That’s a no thanks from me. Yet in Germany the doner meat is good. The kebab men take real pride in their creations. And you don’t feel dirty as soon as you’ve taken a bite. Though maybe that was the drink.

It’s not really the doners that I come home with dreams of from Berlin, though. There was this one meal that still feels like one of the best of my life. It was my first experience of currywurst. It cost about €4 for the wurst and the fried potatoes in some dingy cafe in Kreuzberg, and it was wonderful. On my return I wonder where in London I can find wurst again. It has to be out there. And so Time Out leads me to Kurz & Lang. As far as I can tell, it’s London’s only currywurst joint. It’s open all night at the weekends – you know, in case you’ve been to Fabric. And so the day before a Brick Lane night out I wander over to find out what’s going on. I’m excited, not least because I’m not too familiar with the area – I’m already thinking about meals to come when I walk past St John.

But it’s currywurst night, and St John will wait. Kurz & Lang looks more like a takeaway than a restaurant – bright lights, order at the counter, bar stools with a table lining the wall. I look at all the wursts. They have a few. Currywurst for me please. And potato cubes. And while I’m waiting the five minutes you’ve politely told me it will take to cook the sausage, I’ll have a Schneider Weiss too. How pleasant. Do I want some bread? Oh go on then. You’re fairly charming. Ten pounds? Wouldn’t cost this much in Germany, but you do have a niche market here, I’ll admit.

The beer’s awfully pleasant. It tastes of Germany. I’m not sure I wanted my wurst to be cut up, but I don’t mind – it’s easier to fit the bits into the bread as a sort of sausage sandwich malarkey. There’s lots of very enjoyable sauce. The potatoes aren’t underdone like they can so often be in mid-range eateries. Actually, they’re brilliant. Why are there not more wurst joints in London? What’s going on? How has not everyone realised the genius of this foodstuff? Do we really still eat kebabs after nights out when we could be eating sausage and potatoes? This is as filling as a kebab, and far more pleasant. A tramp comes in and asks me for some money. Being a beer in and relatively cheerful anyway, I give him 50p. He asks for some sausage, and I hand him a bit. He’s a polite tramp, and I don’t mind. There’s too much food for me anyway, really. Not that that stops me from eating it all after he’s gone.

So I leave, and I’m too full, and I miss Berlin a bit more. Strange, I think, that a nation not particularly renowned for its food does the best fast food I’ve ever experienced in Europe – the only type that I’d go back just to taste it again. Except the food of Berlin doesn’t need to call me back anymore. A bus ticket and a slightly-more-expensive-than-its-German-counterparts Kurz & Lang is cheaper than Easyjet. Just.

Cay Tre, Old Street

29th January 2008

I don’t remember ever feeling quite as bad as I did just before Christmas. Heartbreak and I had never really been acquainted before, at least not in the instant, feeling sick, I want to impale my stomach on those railings over there way. So I’d never believed, either, in the tale that it stopped you from eating. But it did, and now I do. I didn’t run out of porridge oats that week. When I finally went into the sandwich shop opposite work, I wasn’t greeted with “the usual?”, because I didn’t really have a usual anymore. The Book, as the Time Out Eating & Drinking Guide is known, went untouched for weeks. I briefly wondered if my only fascination with it was finding cool places to take the girl I loved.

I got hungry eventually.

I’m on my own, then, when I get to Cay Tre. I’m going to a gig in Camden, and I decided earlier in the day to walk there from Old Street. At 8pm I leave the office and think “yeah, I’ll go there” – I don’t even know its name. I’ve been for lunch once before, when it was empty. I get there and it’s full. Seemingly it’s more popular than I thought.

I stick with what I know, because you can’t go wrong with what you know, can you? It’s a large chicken pho and a beer (did someone say dry January? Oh. Fail. Again) for me then please, even though I know large is always too big. New people arrive to sit next to me – a man and a woman. They’re just friends. They ask me what I’m having when it arrives, and the man orders the same. It’s good. Mine’s too big. The large is always too big. But the noodles are good, and there’s bones in there as well as chicken – I like that, it feels like they’re in there for the flavour. I have no idea what half of this green stuff is, but it feels like it’s probably healthy, and that feels like it’s probably what I need right now. The most interesting part of the meal, though, is the conversation on to my right. They’ve got their pho and their rolls, and they’re talking about travel, oh this is dull, they’re richer and go on holiday more than me, oh we’re getting on to love life, this could be more interesting, maybe, maybe. He was seeing a girl before Christmas, and then it “petered out”. She doesn’t understand how these things peter out. He tells her, embarrassedly, that the girl he was seeing was into porn. He means, really, really into porn. He wasn’t so into that. My Steinbeck novel has been open on the same page for the past five minutes, because the embarrassment in this man’s voice is just too much to tear away from. It’s hilarious and depressing at the same time. The former because, well, from the rest of the stories he’s telling it sounds pretty funny, really. The latter because oh dear God, I’m single and it’s a bit terrifying really and I really, really don’t want to be in a cheap Vietnamese restaurant when I’m in my late thirties telling my friends about the girls I’ve let it peter out with in the past two months.

When the bill arrives they take a very long time to bring my change. My neighbours’ conversation has got to the point where if I don’t leave soon, I will cry tears of despair. And I’m out.

I’ll go again, of course. It’s near work. It’s cheap as anything. The pho’s bloody great. But maybe in the afternoon next time. Maybe when it’s not so busy.

Song Que, Kingsland Road

20th November 2007
My buddy Mercedes and I take the long bus journey up the Kingsland Road to Vortex in Dalston. Someone hits her in the face by accident on the bus, and there’s an automated voice saying “the two-four-three” every five minutes. It’s a frustrating start to the evening. We’re off to see Gannets, Three Trapped Tigers and the Portico Quartet. I don’t know anything about this free jazz lark, and she doesn’t either, but we’re giving it a shot. Being a trumpet player, I always feel like a fraud if I don’t go to at least one of the London Jazz Festival’s events every year.

It’s packed and we don’t seem to be on the guestlist, whatever I’d been told, so there’s a nice bit of to-ing and fro-ing before the pleasant chap on the door lets us in anyway. We get upstairs and blimey, what the hell is this? The room is full of people just like me listening intently to some kind of noise. It’s Gannets. It starts to make sense after five minutes when I focus on the drums before everything else, and I’m quite enjoying it. But I haven’t had dinner, and my stomach keeps on telling me that. The Portico Quartet are rather more tuneful, though, and I find it easier to focus my attentions. Except I’m just so damn hungry.

I can’t cope any more, so we leave. It’s 10.45pm. Are we going to get to Song Que before last orders? Time Out fawn over it, but I’ve never been – only to Hanoi Cafe and some other place on Old Street. Mercedes isn’t even aware of the huge numbers of Vietnamese cafes on Kingland Road. So we get on the wrong bus. We get off when it turns off. We get on another bus. We’re ten minutes away from last orders. And so we walk in, get thrown onto a table and are told it’s nearly time to close. We order under pressure – she gets the tofu version of my chicken noodle thingymajiggy-Ican’trememberthename, though spends about a minute umm-ing and err-ing – and it arrives, quick as you like. We eat and we’re the last ones left. It’s filling and it’s nice though you know I’m never sure about onions and if I hadn’t felt like our waiter wanted to kill us for walking in so late, I totally would’ve asked him about chicken noodle soup. But then we pay, and it’s under a tenner and I’ve had a beer, and I feel a little less aggrieved.

We’re in and out in twenty minutes. I’ll keep on trusting Time Out, but I’m not too sure I’ve had enough of a chance to make up my own mind. I have learnt something though. Walking into restaurants ten minutes before they close is not a good idea. You are interrupting the owner’s game of chess, and that never makes anyone happy.