A few months ago, I witnessed an attempted murder in south London. The policeman who later took my statement asked my profession – ‘journalist’ – and his response was unexpected. ‘You must get see some awful things in the line of your work too,’ he sympathised. ‘Oh, I do,’ I said, not wishing to his undermine his friendly empathy. The collapsed soufflés, the split sauces, the well-done steaks... they could keep me awake at night if I let them.
I’m only too aware that when the revolution comes, restaurant critics like me will be first up against the wall. There are few professions more trivial, more unnecessary and more frankly ludicrous than the one I do, and I’m still rather surprised to find myself doing it. Maybe it’s karmic reward for spending the first half of my adult life living in near-poverty, working on foreign aid projects and living in London squats, so I’m not complaining about how things have shaped up. Not only do I now get to eat out a lot, and have my magazine pay the bills, but I also get to travel to unexpected places. Like Finland.
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The Finns, conscious of their own notorious reputation for food, had invited me to give a talk at the British Embassy in Helsinki about why British food is the second worst in Europe (Finland, according to Jacques Chirac, being bottom). Yes, British food has had its problems. I cited Protestantism, industrialisation, Mrs Beeton, agribusiness and the lazy Cypriot man in my corner shop who sells loaves after the sell-by date, but ending on an upbeat note: London’s food revolution of the past two decades has been just that, a revolution. London is now one of the world’s best cities for eating out (New York’s Gormet magazine went as far as to call it the best), and of course the Finns thought that if the British can do it, so can they.
Finland’s food culture is currently looking in rude health, from what I could see. This was my second research trip to Helsinki, and it’s clear they’re making vast strides to modernise their cooking, without abandoning their past. The Finns seem to do everything 110 per cent, whether it’s partying and drinking, designing furniture, or using local and seasonal produce in their kitchens. In Lapland and increasingly in Helsinki, this means the meat they call ‘poro’ – wild reindeer.
My visit coincided with the annual herring market in Helsinki, when Baltic fisherman sell their preserved herrings direct to customers from their boats, but it also with Helsinki’s first poro festival. It seemed as if every top restaurant in the city had reindeer on the menu. You could eat rib steak at Ilmatar; pressed neck at Lasipalatsi; poro tongue ‘in the Japanese style’ at Palace Kämp; braised poro knuckle at Nokka; poro carpaccio at Zetor; poro vorschmack (pâté) at Savoy. You could, and I did, feast on every conceivable part of the reindeer in Helsinki. I ate ribs, I had it cold-smoked, I tried reindeer butter (quite pungent); but my overriding impression was that poro tastes – perhaps not surprisingly (a lot like venison, ie a dense, dark, fine-grained red meat with little fat). By the end of a week in Helsinki, I must have reduced Santa’s sledge-pulling team by one-eighth.
A trip to the United States presented a different sort of opportunity. American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten had urged me more than once to visit the pizzerias of New Haven, Connecticut, if I was seriously interested in finding the world’s best pizza. Unlike him, I don’t have American Vogue’s vast resources for researching any topic which interests me, but I’m better travelled than Jeffrey, and found it hard to believe that the world’s best pizzas are found a mere two hours away from Jeffrey’s New York home – and not in Naples, Italy. This was my chance to out-nerd another food nerd, and find him wrong.
