Caffe Forum - Redux

When I’m in London, I prefer to stay in Kensington.  Why?  Lots of cool pubs.  Wonderful restaurants.  Both Gloucester Road and South Kensington Stations are close at hand.  My rule is:  gotta stay near a tube station on the Piccadilly Line.  Hugely convenient.

How so, you ask?  Oh, these pesky questions. Here are a few stations of the many that connect on the Piccadilly Line:  Covent Garden (best shopping in London, with historic pubs nearby).  Piccadilly Circus (The Heart of London, and the junction of Regent, Piccadilly, and Oxford Steets – talk about shopping!).  Leicester Square (pronounced Lester and the center of the theater district, with many pubs, China Town, and the National Portrait Gallery a couple of blocks away). Knightsbridge (Harrods close by, along with The Science Museum).  I could go on and on, but you’d never remember anyway because all you want to do in London is drink fabulous beer.  My tip of the day:  Do a cut and paste for your wives and significant others, then go raise a pint or two or three in every pub you run across while your W’s and S.O.’s are shopping.

But, all that’s for later.  Any good day in London begins with breakfast, and in the misty morning hours, when you’re staying in the Kensington area (which by the way includes the Royal Albert Hall and The Victoria and Albert Museum and Hyde Park and Kensington Palace), the very best place to start the day is the Caffe Forum. (More cut and paste)

Order a full English breakfast (of which I have previous written, you thankless cad!:  http://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2012/04/full-english-breakfast-tradition.html), or do what I do and order a flat white (coffee).  What is that?  It’s what the French call café au lait, and the Italians call a cappuccino, but without all the fluff.  Any coffee at Caffe Forum comes with a complimentary croissant, and the pleasant ‘London-is-waking-up’ atmosphere.  Also free. Coffee time is bargain time, planning time, slowly rev-ing the engine time.

Yes, I have also written of the Caffe Forum before, but it’s such a special place that on lazy mornings, sipping a coffee, no matter where I am, I dream of sitting at a wooden table, the rattle of dishes in the background, the scurry of wait staff around me, the aromas of fresh eggs and bacon permeating every corner, the young professionals patiently standing in line adjusting their ties or their skirts, the rush of cool air every time the front door swings open, the idle conversations in a dozen languages, as husbands and wives cheer each other and calm their recalcitrant children, and the elderly sit peacefully alone, reading their newspapers, with everything accompanied by the clamor and swirl of traffic on Gloucester Road.

Caffe Forum is a very personal London in a nutshell.  You really must go there.  Remember:  FIVE pubs nearby.

The Lemon Table – A Rare Collection of Stories

Speaking of London Bookstores, which of course I mean the bookstores I painstakingly gave you a glimpse of in the last blog.  What?  Haven’t read it yet?  Fie on thee!

For my loyal followers (those that have read at least one of my blogs), I offer a book I picked up at South Kensington Books.

A disquieting book, The Lemon Tree, a grouping of stories.  Not disquieting because Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, The Sense of an Ending) tosses out porno-erotic words like fuck and cunt – which one would think reasonably go together – but because the stories dissect one of life’s great mysteries and tragedies, growing old.  Life slipping over the edge.

There’s love, of course, sweet days of splendor-in-the-grass, as Wordsworth put it.  There’s also rapturous sex and promises of wondrous days to come, promises that slowly fade with the seasons of life, so slowly that no one notices until the promise has passed and winter is upon us.

Love.  Barnes relishes the stages of love in ways you may or may not find comfortable. Fresh blooms morphing into limp petals, petals floating idly in a last attempt to live.  The water in the bowl, a tepid, malodorous mix of the dead and dying, until the stench is poured down the drain and all that remains is a white residue of that which has passed.

Getting old.  A collection of things we did, no longer do, or no longer can do.  Ah, the pity, the depth of anguish these stories evoke.  And yet, some of them rise above the fading light and fog-like gloom.

“A Short History of Hairdressing dances in the delight of every age.  “Hygiene” sparkles with wit.  “Knowing French” sports a lyrical attitude in the face of the fading light.

I don’t often read a book of individual stories.  Not sure why.  Perhaps a book, be it novel or non-fiction, lends itself to dreams that put us aside from our selves.  Stories are a jazz riff to a novel’s concert.  When I say stories, I’m talking about short stories and short, short stories, all the way up to short novellas. An odd thing about stories is that they lend themselves to movies more readily than a book of say five hundred pages.  With a book, a writer and director are compelled to trim and chop, to turn a tree into a single branch, or even a toothpick.

Some of the tales in The Lemon Table run to twenty pages or more, some stretch to only a few pages.  With one reading you can easily imagine a movie.  A story allows you to build, to amplify instead of chop.  A good story is distilled, almost like poetry.

No matter the length, Barnes does a superb rendition of character construction.  In ‘The Revival,’ a tale of unrequited love, the description is so often simple, “But thirty miles was all they travelled together.”  And yet, you feel the aging man’s anguish and longing, love for the sake of love and the sake of living.

Barnes’ writing is so beautifully descriptive that my imagination leads me on, even when my heart screams “You don’t want to know this!”

Evocative is a word that comes to mind.  Perhaps ‘mirror’ would be even better.

A big question:  Is the book uplifting or depressing?  On the surface it’s a little of both, until you realize the tone is a call to action.  Make of life what you will.  Don’t let precious time wither.  There’s plenty to be happy about.  Don’t wait.  Use your time well.  Love.  Travel. Celebrate.  Do all those things, with people who make your life worth living.

Julian Barnes wrote a remarkable collection of stories.  Read them.  Use them well.

The Queens Arms: Quintessential Gastro Pub

A Jewel of a Gastro Pub!

You’re asking yourself, what the hell is a Gastro Pub?  In the last ten years or so, a good number of London pubs added lively menus to their already excellent selection of beers.  Why bother?  You don’t come to a pub for the coq au vin!

As Lee Corso says, not so fast my friend.  The scene changes in front of our eyes.  We know that yesterday is not today, but we’re slow to grasp the subtleties.

There was a time, not so long ago, when pubs catered mostly to locals or special groups.  A pub in every neighborhood, in every district.  A working man’s pub, or a footballer’s pub, or an after work spot for the coat and tie crowd. They still exist, but they’re becoming more rare.  

Wanta know the ‘why’ of change?  Follow the money.  Take a gander at the London real estate market!

Now picture the pub owner who caters to a handful of regulars.  A new mall is planned, or the gentry upscale the area and the pub owner’s offered a couple of kegs of gold for his property.  Maybe, the pub keeper just gets too old to pull a hundred pints a day.  Too often, the pub just closes.

How do you tell a traditional, or local pub?  When you walk in, conversation stops and a couple of dozen eyeballs look you over like you’re a man who’s just come out of the ladies’ room. The menu seldom varies.  Sausages and mash. Shepard’s pie.  Steak and kidney pudding. Fish and chips.  Not bad, but predictable.

A younger crew takes over, less bound to tradition, more attuned to the Food Network.  Dreams soar!  Meat pies and chips (fries) get a facelift. Sauces, herbs, and other exotic flavors rule the kitchen.  Simple mash becomes buttery, garlic potatoes. Wine lists decorate every table.  A full selection of potables echoes from the mirror at the bar.

Better be good enough to compete with the restaurants.  Better be some place to take a wife or a date, and hip enough for the younger generation.  Some place bright and cheery, but still with that traditional pub feel and a fine selection of gravity ales.

Enter the ‘gastro pub.’  Brighter colors on the outside. Flowers outside and in.  More like a French bistro, yet still pubish.  Lots of dark wooden tables and bistro chairs. Brighter, indirect lighting, with a nod to atmosphere.

The food?  Definitely worth a second or third trip.  The Queens Arms did it for me.  Went there a couple of years ago and had a splendid assortment of finger food, along with some tasty ales.  Soon as I was in the area again, the QA sprang to mind.

Don't neglect the hard ciders.  Apple flavor without the sweetness.

It’s a tough place to find, tucked neatly away on a little street called Queens Gate Mews.  The complication comes in the name.  Nearby run Queens Gate Terrace and Queens Gate itself. Wait a sec, there are also TWO Queens Gate Mews!

It was raining.  Hard.  We ambled lost and forlorn.  With the hood on my rain jacket pulled up, my field of vision was a railway tunnel with blinders on.

In the rain streaked gloaming, I stopped in front of a big picture window, back from the street and about half a story off the ground.  I waved both my arms and got a young woman’s attention.  “Queens Gate Mews,” I mouthed.  She pointed to the right, then the left, then held up a finger for me to wait while she conferred with a colleague.   The two women pulled out a map.  Consulted a computer.  The rain poured.  They discussed the situation, again pointing left and right.  Back to the computer.

The woman pointed toward the door and motioned for me to meet her.  I was with my wife.  Opportunity lost.  I joined her under the front porch roof for an exchange of  finger pointing lessons on the map.  Success!  Cross Queens Gate Street, turn onto Queens Gate Terrace, walk on in the dark and stormy night, and turn into Queens Gate Mews.  There you will find The Queens Arms.

What is a Mews?  Simply put, a side street of former stables, now morphed into  classy apartments that only Bill Gates’ immediate family can afford. Mews comes from the roost for hunting falcons. When mews became stables, the name stayed.

This time, I needed something more substantial than tasty little morsels. I got it!  Chorizo and minced pork burger, laden with dark caramelized onions.  Light, herbed crab cakes.  The traditional fish and chips.  Also, one of the best selection of beers in the city.

Pork and chorizo burger. Dazzling! 

Feather light crab cakes with oven roasted, garlic potatoes.

Light, flaky pastry covers a chicken pot pie! 

This is not a place you want to dash into and dash back out.  Especially if it’s raining.  The QA is a freehouse, meaning they don’t belong to a brewery and can serve any ale they want.  There’s a photo of the ‘pulls’ on offer when I was there, but the ale menu changes often. The barman told me they had another dozen new kegs in the cellar. 

Make no mistake, the QA means eating and drinking on a semi-lavish scale, with a nod to both tradition and economy.

Enough blather.  Time to order another pint.  The night’s young.  The ales are perfect.