No Smoking, No Ducks, No Barbecues

Everything is illegal except Starbucks

The first to go were Shisha pipes, the exotic, sociable, bubbling way to take a massive hit of smoke without coughing, or smelling of anything worse than apples. Apparently, it’s marginally less healthy than a Winehouse-scale crack binge, but it feels fine, and was becoming the chic way to meet friends without having to drink. The smoking ban killed it: you can still have shisha at outside tables, but this summer they might as well have suggested smoking underwater. All those lovely little cafes around Regent’s Park and Shepherd’s Bush, which sold mint tea, and ridiculously sweet honey-based snacks to go with your apple tobacco, are closing down for good – no doubt to be replaced by yet more branches of Starbucks.

The next blow came when the EU announced that the duck ovens used in Chinatown failed to comply with some health and safety directive or other. Now, I’ve eaten those ducks, those gorgeous, oily, crisp-fatted ducks, dunked in salty-sweet Hoi Sin, and there is nothing about them that could possibly comply with anyone’s concept of health. There’s been a stay of execution, announced this week, that has allowed Peking Duck to stay on the menu for now, but the most popular dish in Chinatown could well be on the way out soon, and with it most of the decent cheap restaurants in the West End.

And now – reported this week in Time Out – we discover that Korean barbecues are to meet the same fate as Chinese ovens. This, if you haven’t yet encountered it, is a particularly inspired piece of traditional South-East Asian wackiness in which diners are brought a selection of marinated meats to cook at their own table. They’ve sprung up all over Soho, and make an inexpensive, sociable and relatively healthy alternative to Chinese food. Apparently the gas burners, made in Korea by some fabulously hi-tech corporation, and costing 500 pounds a pop, haven’t been certified as safe, and so all these restaurants are going to have to close down.

I’ve already written about the smoking and drinking-on-public-transport bans, in a kind of abstract, doesn’t-affect-me-but-what-about-the-poor-teenagers way, but this latest round of health-related meddling is starting to directly impact on my social life. If I wanted every coffee shop and cheap restaurant to be some identikit high street chain, I could go and live in the suburbs. The whole point of London, the reason we put up with the staggering rents, the Tube strikes and the charity muggers is the constant excitement of new discoveries, the compression of thousands of nations into an area the same size as Luxembourg, and the endless sparking of the new ideas against ancient traditions.

I would suggest that when an entire cuisine is being ruined by a rule, it’s the law that needs to change, rather than the restaurant.

Boys and their Toys

If you think all those City boys are managing assets and closing high-end deals then you’re wrong; what they’re actually spending their long hours doing is melting down their Oyster cards and attaching the chip to their watches, so they can swipe in-and-out with their Tag Heuers. And all this with just a jar of nail varnish remover – imagine all the bankers queuing up at the cosmetics counter in the Boots on Cannon Street when they found out! The more Blue Peter option is to make a fairy wand with the chip inside and look as though you are getting through the barrier with magic…

London on the World Stage

London is obviously getting its finger out now that China has set the precedent with the most spectacular (and expensive and controversial) opening ceremony in history. Well, the advertising campaign to entice visitors to the capital in 2012 should do it…if the image of the globe with the Thames running across it didn’t, unfortunately, remind people of the picture off the title sequence of ‘EastEnders’. Still, at least the strapline makes the link: ‘From the Mayor’s Thames Festival to the Chelsea Flower Show, to the Notting Hill Carnival, there’s a world of celebrations in London.’ Catchy!

To be, or not to be…

Some dirty underground brickwork, apparently Tudor, is said to be the foundations of an east London theatre where Shakespeare himself was known to tread the boards. The site, somewhere in Shoreditch, was uncovered with much nodding of heads from archaeologists and ooh-ing from thespies like Sir Ian McKellen. Legend has it that after a spat with the landowner in 1599 (planning permission was still an issue back then!), the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which included Shakespeare, dismantled the theatre in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and shipped the wood across the Thames – a bit of putting the pieces back together and the Globe was born!

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