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.
Eating London 