Restaurant reviews by Justin Tanner, our retired food critic who has it on good authority Keir Starmer’s secretly a poof.
FOOD is fuel, and anyone who talks pretentious bollocks about it is a con artist. ‘The sea bass goujons are sublime.’ Piss off. They’re just up-themselves fish fingers.
Take ‘food festivals’. Artisan this, pop-up f**king that. Horse shit. Churchill would never have allowed them back in Britain’s glory days. Mind you, I suppose rationing wouldn’t have helped. And U-boats.
However there’s one on in town and being an open-minded chap I’m going along to see what all the fuss is about. Plus I’ve heard there’s loads of freebies. That’s why food critics do it, you know. Jay Rayner hasn’t been to Tesco for ten years.
When I get there they’re selling beer, thank God, but in plastic pots you can carry around. It’s the worst kind of nanny state interference in our lives.
But they’re not wrong about the handouts. Crowds like f**king scavengers queuing up for a few gratis mouthfuls of grub. I bet half of them are on benefits that could have been spent topping up my pension. But if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so I prepare to gorge myself on titbits without touching my wallet.
Which, as it turns out, are mostly fudge. Mary mother of Jesus, how many flavours? Sea-salted caramel, banoffee, biscoff, rum and raisin, ad infinitum. ‘Do you make and pack these yourselves then?’ I ask the guy on one of the stalls. ‘Oh yes, all prepared and packaged on our premises.’ ‘So you’re a fudge packer then?’ No response. Bloody hell, even fudge has gone woke.
Then flapjacks. Crapjacks, more like. Still, it’s free, so I try one of everything before muttering the ubiquitous British fib that ‘I’ll come back later when I’ve decided which to buy’. We both know I’m lying.
I move on to the cheeses, and there’s more than you can shake a shitty stick at. I’ve never understood that. What’s the point when we’ve already invented the king of cheese, Cheddar?
And – surprise, surprise – there’s loads of foreign shit. Olives – not food. Thai curry that’ll have you crapping molten lava. Italian hams that won’t be a patch on Tesco’s honey roast. The samosas are okay though. I grab a taster from eight different stalls so that’s my stomach lined for the pub.
Job done, I’m left to reflect on why anyone would put up with these crowds to pay over the odds for stuff you can get in supermarkets. I suppose this is what our country’s come to nowadays.
You’d never have seen our lads go over the top at the Somme clutching a vegan sausage roll in one hand and a caramel latte in the other, would you? I mean, obviously you wouldn’t really take food instead of a rifle, but you get my point.
