Why I'm starting The Long Lunch...
...and why you'll distinguish yourself as a person of good taste by subscribing
This is a newsletter mostly about food and drink, though not necessarily always in that order. It is also about the journey of said food and drink from production to consumption, including all the pitstops along the way. It concerns the people involved in each stage of the process - the farmer, the forager, the supplier, the restaurateur, the cook, the eater, the drinker - as well as the places where all this pans out and the kind of lifestyles it engenders. The Long Lunch is egalitarian in outlook. Focus will be on the humble as much as the refined - the trifle as much as the truffle. I remain as excited by the perfect caff as by the perfect restaurant. And yet frequently it will not be about food or drink at all, but rather what happens when and where these things are indulged - the laughter, the argument, the gossip, the enlightenment, the intemperance. Most of all, it will be about my enduring love for everything mentioned above and more. I probably won’t mention avocados much.
Admittedly, the sell is a bit punchy. Do I really believe that signing up to the ramblings of a gluttonous bugger for the bottle will mark you out as a discerning character? Not really. But I do hope I can guarantee good taste. In that I intend to taste some good things along the way, and that by reading about them you might be inspired to follow suit. I also intend to welcome you to the lunch table of numerous gourmands, culinary artists and hash slingers far more illustrious than myself, and in doing so offer you an insight into a world that has fascinated me for most of my adult life. While lunching well in the best company is surely one of the great pleasures, what happens on the other side of the pass - the culture of the kitchen, the craft and ingenuity of the chef, the alchemy of the cooking process - is a preoccupation that has never ceased to allure and entrance. It should go without saying, too, that I will humbly attempt to continue the noble tradition of great food writing, from Elizabeth David to Bill Buford, via Gill and Bourdain, albeit on a new platform with a new rhythm.
None of which really serves to explain why I’m starting The Long Lunch. During my career as a journalist, I’ve had cause to meet and interview many chefs and restaurateurs, and each time wondered what life would have been like had my career taken another path. For one assignment, I managed to blag my way into a professional kitchen as a commis-chef for a week of blood, sweat and 17-hour days. This relatively short yet profound experience gave me my probable answer: single, sapped, callused, anxious and suffering from a perennial condition known in medical circles as chef’s arse. Even so, it was one of the most exhilarating and memorable experiences of my life. I have long since devoured any sort of high-pressured kitchen endeavour as represented in writing – Down and Out in Paris and London; White Heat; Dirt – and figured this could be an outlet for similar efforts.
Meanwhile, my day job as an editor for the past 23 years has brought with it the good fortune of many very pleasant and, indeed, very long lunches – though admittedly this happens rather less often than it did. And while I am a keen cook with good knife skills and a knowledge of butchery that means I could acquit myself creditably in a skills test with Michel Roux Jr, it is in the act of serious lunching that I am more naturally gifted. What is a serious lunch? I’d contend it starts with an aperitif at 12.30pm, which itself marks a prompt end of the working day. (Serious lunches are almost always weekday affairs.) The ensuing three/four/five hours have no real prescription, except that various characters must come and go, time will become relative, and the outside world word of work, stress and forbearance should be forgotten. Depending on the venue, this might be humoured, tolerated or abhorred. I like the places where it is indulged. In situations like these, the way in which the kitchen and the dining room co-exist on such different wavelengths, mindsets and motivations is something I find endlessly fascinating. These parallel universes – that of the stove and the banquette, discipline and gratification – will, I hope, become reconciled by The Long Lunch.
Working as an editor has already allowed me to do some of what will inevitably feature on this forum. Food and nutrition is a key content pillar at the magazine I work for and we routinely feature recipes, food guides and essays. I’ll be offering more of the same - or similar - here. Being an editor also once gave me the opportunity to launch an annual supplement entirely devoted to food and drink. The magazine was called Epicure and, I think, pretty bloody good, albeit short-lived owing to a dearth of advertising revenue. But what it didn’t allow me to do was tell some of the stories I’ve encountered along the way and that have stuck with me most. Like the time I accidentally stumbled across a white supremacist ring while researching authentic barbecue in South Carolina. Or when my wife and I had the meal of our lives in a remote Tuscan restaurant while on honeymoon, only to discover upon leaving that it wasn’t a restaurant at all but the house of a spinster whose evening we had mistakenly interrupted. I’d like to tell some of these stories here, too.
Then there’s the book that I’ve been threatening to write for 15 years or so - a biography of London food, told through a bunch of independent foodie vignettes, which together paint a compelling picture of the capital’s itinerant gut. One would tell the story of the Manze family’s bold move from Ravello to London in 1878 to set up an ice-cream-making business, only for young Michele Manze to marry the daughter of Robert Cooke and start a pie-and-mash business like his father-in-law. Another might concern the apothecary where Elizabeth David would buy her olive oil for a taste of Mediterranean sunshine amid post-war English gloom. You get the picture. I’ve now decided to give this idea a home on Substack, only with the slightly more ordered title of An A-Z of London Food. That said, I may not tackle the alphabet in sequence, and I won’t promise not to write about the same letter more than once. I’m not sure what A will be yet. But B is definitely for Beigel.
In a sense, what I’m trying to do is order my scattergun thoughts about food into a magazine-y format of sections and franchises. My lunch dates will feature, fittingly enough, under the Long Lunch With… banner; random stories, foodie excursions and culinary experiments will appear under Amuse-Bouche; the A-Z of London Food is self-titled; while exclusive recipes from chefs far more accomplished than me will live in Kitchen Confidential. I also hope to build something of a community here whereby readers can respond to my musings, offer experiences of their own, and suggest questions for my guests. I’m not sure anything quite like the sum of its parts exists on the internet, which is sort of the point.
OK now for the small print. I’ll be writing at least one dispatch each week - a conversation or an essay, maybe a rumination or a recipe. If you subscribe - and I very much want you to do just that - then Friday morning will be the main drop. You’ll receive an email with my latest effort just as you’re contemplating what 1pm holds. My intention is for dispatches to become more frequent as I settle into a groove, with an audio element becoming a fortnightly feature a little way down the line.
The vast majority of what I publish here will be free to consume - and certainly everything to begin with. Ultimately I want as many people as possible to become part of the Long Lunch family. However, at some point in the future, paying subscribers - I like to call them my special friends - will hopefully be able to sample extras from the kitchen. The forthcoming Long Lunch podcast, for instance, will be limited to special friends, as will longer entries that form part of my A-Z of London Food. Paid-for privileges would also include the ability to take part in community discussions as well as pitch questions for forthcoming guests.
But all this is a long way off. For now, it’s a free buffet. Grab a plate and pile it high. Join the table. Be my guest.
I've been deprived of your prose for too long Toby and look forward to tale to come.. as long as the Raygel isn't mentioned.