london restaurants

You were right by here Louis!

xp
Reminiscent of yavaş in Turkish, and seems to be the same in Persian as well. What I see when I try to go to Arabic itself though, is, ببطء, which is completely different.

Lots of different varieties of Arabic of course.

I grew up in a Persian and Arabic-speaking household. So it's possible I'm getting the two mixed up, but I doubt it. Different dialect is much more likely.

Alas, I can't read the script. Mived here when i was like 5.

Anyway I do think the proprietor was kidding around :)

More good sandwiches from 40 Maltby St today, I don't love eggs but the fritatta sandwich was still pretty good. squash salad was excellent. Toby rated the fish finger salad.

Other places we've been that were really good recently were Tofu Vegan on Upper St (this place is so exciting to me and I want to try everything on the menu eventually), and also finally made it to Master Wei in Bloomsbury, which was also great (and we both noted that one bowl of noodles would have been plenty of food for a lunch, so potentially a nice weekend combo with the British Museum)

Interested to learn as I need a replacement noodle place in Bloomsbury. I made a nostalgic visit to the Hare and Tortoise at Brunswick Square- a staple of the early 2000s for me - and wasn't too impressed.

The laksa at H&T is still better than it has any right to be.

Try Chang’s Noodle on New Oxford Street too.

Anyone been to any of the Ottolenghi restaurants (or deli)?

We went to the one in Spitalfields a few years ago for lunch, it was good but expensive, kind of what I would have expected? I think we've also done takeaway from one of the delis and again, it's all very tasty but is more per person that I'd tend to expect for salad-y stuff. I seem to remember both were a kind of "pick three of our salad/dish of the day" plates.

I wish I liked bitty salads but I don’t; in other news, the space that was Cigala is about to open as another Honey & Co - also along Israeli/Levantine/Palestinian lines.

Ottolenghis are fine, but go to Honey & Co instead imo

went to chisuru in brixton last week and it was *v good*. best was probably Ebiripo (Celeriac, Mushroom Shitto, Bitter Leaves & Pickled Oyster Mushroom).

but the pickled carrots, fermented rice and tangerine sauce was a+ and Ekuru (Wild Watermelon Seeds, Black Eyed Beans, Pumpkin Pesto & Scotch Bonnet Sauce) also v good.

my date juice negroni also spectacularly good.

https://i.imgur.com/GtfiKDN.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/GtfiKDN.jpg

will that work i do not know

yes! handy.

that looks fantastic

ooh, that looks very good, thanks for sharing and reporting back

just been out walking over the walthamstow flats and we ate here under a pub umbrella on a rickety plastic table and stools. it was really good. i had sea bass which had been grilled with paprika and my friend had some of the best calamari she can remember having.

it does six week stints at tottenham hale, islington and hackney. today was its last day in walthamstow.

https://i.imgur.com/8IjeVzr.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/TOAbv9j.jpg

nice!!

I know, I always want to go when it's near me but I never do

They opened Christmas Day!

Really 'enjoying' the abolish restaurants discourse on twitter. In the discussion below this tweet is where I found the best articulation of it.

Mad how people can sign up to "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" but will totally lose the plot when any actual specific thing is suggested. https://t.co/r45cjw6Ezy

— disturbed_down_with_the_sickness.wav (@MediocreDave) May 28, 2022

Taking a category like 'restaurant', which emerged distinctively in modern Europe, and applying it ahistorically to any practice of group food preparation, forecloses a critique of the particular kind of institution built on particular social relations that a restaurant is.

otm across several abolition discourses

definitely there's a need to combat exploitation of restaurant workers, but once you reach a point that the people in a restaurant are a) doing it because they want to, b) under less time pressure and c) sharing the profits equally, then frankly there's no further cause to challenge restaurants from a socialist perspective imo

this scenario would of course make restaurants smaller and would challenge fast food chain culture, which strike me as far more realistic goals than abolishing restaurants, which will of course not happen (given a broad yet accurate definition of 'restaurant')

anyway, good posting from renowned poster Arbeitology, you definitely achieved the target m8 (spread online muck of a weekend, get people arguing past each other)

the movie 'boiling point' was basically a horror movie about uk high-end restaurant culture, worth seeing

His point is almost nobody wants to work the punishing Labour for fuck all that people in restaurants are made to because they need to survive.

He is coming from actually abolishing money and the profit motive. That's why you don't get what he's saying and posting nonsense like b) xp = and watching docs that tell you the above but calling it a 'horror movue' instead of people's reality.

otm across several abolition discourses

― difficult listening hour, Sunday, 29 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

The discussion between Dave and the Brazilian anarchist on canteens was really interesting and took it a step further.

I've worked as a Kitchen Porter/Dishwasher and it's fucking dogshit work and nobody in a sane state of mind would choose to do it for minimum wage.

Boiling Point is a one-take fiction piece w/ ilx favourite Stephen Graham as the chef.

'boiling point', while based on grim reality, was literally a work of fiction? (exactly xp) but yeah, the sort of necessary art that challenges the admittedly grotesque state of (some) UK restaurant culture (I wouldn't speak for it elsewhere)

Cool. Excuse me for tuning out halfway through imago's bullshit xp

What would challenge the restaurant culture is abolishing that culture lol.

calzino otm re: kitchen porter work.

i’ve probably told this before but i once replied to an ad for a kitchen porter without knowing what that term meant and showed up wearing a white button-up shirt! they sort of chuckled and led me back to the kitchen.

you are at the bottom of the Kitchen hierarchy and in my experience you end up amassing hours of unpaid overrun every week. hey .. but hey let's do it for team kitchen!

"people arguing past each other"

like yeah bro, I think nurses probably have a lot to say about how the workplaces in hospitals is organised, and we should listen to them! - but I really think it's a cheap trick to move 'abolish restaurants' to 'what about hospitals' lol https://t.co/pbx58zsKeU

— Arbeitology (@Arbeit_Fish) May 28, 2022

there isn't really an argument as far as i can see, if capitalism is ended - yeah i know - then the artefacts, institutions and relationships of capitalism have to end, even the ones people think are good

not really surprising that a number of people who consider themselves anticapitalist haven't really thought things thru that far

that was a lot of "really"s, some kind of Lacanian slip obv

the bonnington cafe in vauxhall is a good post-capitalist model for a restaurant. people sign up to cook. there’s a calendar with an indication of what type of menu to expect each night. you book a table in advance. the price of the meals covers the food, the labour and the rent. byob. musicians come sometimes. i once saw brecht/weill songs performed there. some of the diners knew the words and they passed the mic around.

oh that sounds frightfully darling, shall we give it a whirl?

NV - I loved the surrounding discussions and threads. It was good that the original poster actually answered a lot of quote tweets and didn't back down as it got him to expand. It's one thing to say 'abolish prisons', but a restaurant and the whole business of eating out is another matter.

Got me to thinking why dystopias are so popular too. Far easier to imagine the breakdown of society than this.

also

you book a table in advance. the price of the meals covers the food, the labour and the rent.

paradigm shift y'all

when I first read that I was like 'the CUSTOMERS sign up to cook?' and thought okay, there might be something in that, but no, it's the standard model except with more ~solidarity~

anybody can sign up to cook. at least that’s how it was when i was going there (a few years ago now). but it’s not for the faint hearted! the standards are high and there are a lot of plates to serve up. sorry you seem to find this so irritating imago.

An unfinished concept.

Got me to thinking why dystopias are so popular too. Far easier to imagine the breakdown of society than this.

yes i've been thinking about the limited amount of stuff i know about food vendors in precapitalist cultures and it'd be interesting to read more about that. some of the conversations have been good and enlightening, i just mean that i think the "this too shall pass" side of the discussion is clearly correct

apologies, ignoring the singing stuff collective restaurant ownership emanating from a squat/commune model does actually sound like a nice idea regardless of how wellmeaningbourgie the clientele actually end up being, albeit nothing too far removed from the traditional small-restaurant model of the chef also being the owner and any employees often being their family members or friends

anyway as we all love Twitter here's a good thread by a communist about all this

It seems (like *every single form of 'discourse' on twitter*) based on a semantic ambiguity. He denotes a 'restaurant' as the specific institution unique to capitalism where you make food based on exploitation. Others denote it as any specified place people make food for others.

— 🅄🄱🄾🄰 (@Uboatheflesh) May 29, 2022

From the last thread you can tell that's a pretty clueless thread. Arbeit isn't looking to organise or anything lol, it's his take on restaurants, as someone who works and sees the exploitation in the industry.