19th November 2007
My girlfriend and I go to Daphne in search of dinner. Nothing fancy, just some food please. It’s been raining all day, we are both more than tired – me of driving, she of being awake – and after spending ten minutes trying to find somewhere to park near the Holly Bush, we’ve given up and gone to Camden instead. It’s a toss up between Andy’s Taverna next door and Daphne, and for whatever reason Daphne wins.
We are both marginally OCD about where we sit, and a tiny dance ensues. I like to sit where I can see the door. She likes to sit with her back to the wall. Often this causes problems – sometimes, we are clearly both eyeing up exactly the same seat, and it can take time to get to an acceptable seating arrangement. Yet the staff are remarkably cool about our moving table once, and then swapping seats. Our final arrangement is acceptable, but not quite perfect, and we keep on muttering to each other about the booths at the back. Normally we’d ask. Today we can’t quite muster enough energy to care.
I go with lamb – kleftiko – and she goes with swordfish. Every time I go to a Greek restaurant I find myself wondering why on earth they serve the rice separately – is one supposed to eat it aside from the main, or is it just a way of getting round presenting the whole meal nicely on one plate? Either way it creates more dishwashing, and I can’t say I approve. But the kleftiko is good – it tastes like my dad’s winter casseroles – and the smidgens of tomatoes involved are a nice zing when I come across them.
My girlfriend is fond of what she calls “the pudding element” in a meal – essentially, something sweet to finish up with. She says she doesn’t feel like a meal is finished until the pudding element has been consumed, and asks me from time to time – when I shrug my shoulders and say that I’m full – how on earth my belly knows that a meal is over if there is no pudding element at the end of it. When the bill arrives – £28.50, before service, if you’re asking – so do four Turkish delights. She is delighted, eats two, looks at me weirdly when I say I’m not bothered, and somehow eats the other two as well.
And so to home, and despite a good meal I can’t help but thinking we would have been better off making dinner ourselves this evening. State of mind prevented particularly glistening conversation (and normally we are full of it), and I am starting to work out that it is pointless doing something that should make you feel Good when it is impossible for you to feel anything other than Bad. When you are so tired that when you blink you wonder if it would be okay to keep your eyes shut, not even the Wolseley’s Knickerbocker Glory (and I will come to those, in due course) will cheer you. And then there’s the other thing: when I am eating Greek, even in the best of moods, there is always a tiny problem – that little voice in my head “It’s nice, sure…but it’s not Lemonia, is it?”.
Eating London 