2457: Time Away

Andie and I have spent a couple of days in Bournemouth, not for any particular reason, just to "get away" from it all. I won't speak for Andie, but certainly in my case, it was much needed.

I've been wracked with stress and anxiety of months now, largely due to relentless feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness and uselessness due to the seemingly never-ending job hunt. I've described these feelings before, but they bear repeating: I know I have so much to offer the world, and it's inordinately frustrating that it seems nigh impossible to convince the people who hold the pursestrings of that fact.

All that said, just before we left on Monday morning, I was contacted by a recruitment consultant for a job that I feel I can do, and I also put in an application for another job that I felt quite confident about. I'm not going to get my hopes up too much for either of them, but, well, they're something at least, which is in stark contrast to the fat lot of nothing I've heard from a variety of employers for the last few months.

The time away has been nice, though it's made me realise quite how much I carry stress in my body as well as my mind. Today in particular, I've just been absolutely exhausted, and all I've wanted to do is sleep. Quite a lot of today has been taken up with napping, to be perfectly honest, but it's been nice; Andie could evidently do with a break, too, so it's been thoroughly pleasant to be somewhere that we can just rest without having to worry about anything that we were supposed to be doing. Our only commitments each day have been getting up in time for breakfast, and getting somewhere in time for dinner service.

The hotel we're staying at is really nice. It's got a very 1950s Art Deco feel about it — including the stereotypical Art Deco font — but it doesn't feel "old" at all. It's in good condition and clearly very modern, but the overall aesthetic of it is clearly inspired by Art Deco.

There's a poncey restaurant here, too; on our first day, we were fortunate enough to win a £25 voucher for it, so we had dinner there last night. The restaurant, I feel, struck a good balance between the "modern cooking" that I find so unsatisfying and providing actually flavoursome, generous portions of good food. I had some scallops for a starter, an excellent burger for a main and possibly the best trifle I've ever had, ever for dessert. (The custard clearly had cream in it, there was a big dollop of clotted cream on top and there were plenty of strawberries throughout.)

Tonight, meanwhile, we went to the hotel next door for dinner; as well as a fancy restaurant, they have a pub, so we enjoyed some hearty traditional British pub food. Even that was really good, though; I had a macaroni cheese that clearly had actual proper cheese in it rather than being a microwave jobby.

Back home tomorrow, and while I'm not sure I'd say I'm revitalised and refreshed — I still feel pretty tired — I do feel a little more inclined to face the challenges ahead. One day at a time, I guess.

1943: Meat, Meat, Meat

Went out for dinner this evening as part of my continuing combined stag and birthday celebrations. We went to a Brazilian place in Southampton that I neglected to remember the name of, but which a quick Google reveals is called Fogo Gaucho.

Fogo Gaucho is a place that I've been curious to try for a while, as it sounded like an intriguing dining experience. It's a place where you pay a flat rate for your meal (plus drinks) and then simply sit at your table while you have lots of different bits of meat brought to you. In between said carnivorousness, you have the opportunity to visit a buffet and fill up your plate with some other bits and pieces like veggies, potatoes, rice and Brazilian stew, but the highlight of the experience is undoubtedly the meat.

And it was a fine selection of meat, too, running the gamut from spicy chicken thighs to some wonderful cuts of beef steak and lamb. At the start of the evening, the serving staff ask how you prefer your meat (rare, medium and so forth) and remember it, cutting pieces of meat from giant, majestic skewers that are according to your liking and then inviting you to pull them off the skewer with a pair of thoughtfully provided tongs.

The meat was delicious. It was all seasoned in various ways — pork ribs had a tasty, sweet coating, for example, while one of the cuts of lamb had a garlicky flavour to it. The spicy chicken thighs, meanwhile, were, well, spicy, and the beef steak cuts were wonderful, with the varied cuts provided really allowing you to appreciate the difference between different types.

The most common criticism of the place is that the meat is all a bit salty, and I'd concur with that; I don't know if that's a hallmark of Brazilian-style cooking or if it's a deliberate choice intended to get you having more drinks — drinks cost extra, remember — but either way, it didn't bother me too much. It was a great meal — and great value if you make sure to go when you're really hungry — and I'm pleased to have discovered this place. Now I have somewhere fun to take people who come to visit!

Now I'm very tired, so I will call it a night there. More games tomorrow!

1300: I'm Not a Foodie

After going out for a very nice (and expensive) meal for a friend's stag weekend tonight, I can confirm something I've suspected for quite some time now: I'm not a foodie.

It's not that I can't appreciate food that has had care, attention, time and effort expended on it to make it look, taste and smell great. It's just that I don't think these expensive restaurants are significantly nicer than something simple. If anything, I find fancy food too fussy — there are too many flavours for me, when I much prefer something simple, homely and enjoyable.

Take steaks. I love a good steak. Steak is one of the most delicious meats there is when just cooked nicely and served up by itself, perhaps with some chips and/or a bit of salad. Smother it in some sort of sauce or marinade, though, and it becomes considerably less appealing — the delicious taste of the steak is, more often than not, overwhelmed by the taste of the sauce, and that's not the reason I wanted to have steak in the first place.

The menu this evening had a lot of delicious things on it — steak, fish, chicken, pasta, gnocchi. And yet I found it very difficult to pick something I actually liked the sound of, because for every item that was based on something I enjoy — steak, fish, chicken, pasta, gnocchi — it was promptly made far too fussy by rubbing rosemary all over it, festooning it with onions or incorporating herbs and spices I'd never heard of.

This may sound like being a fussy eater and I guess it sort of is — my longstanding violent dislike of onions precludes me from eating a lot of fancy food, which is often riddled with them — but more than being fussy, it's simply the fact that I just don't really enjoy food that's too "complicated", for want of a better word. I don't know whether this is because I don't have a particularly refined palate, or because I'm not used to food of this type, or because it's just my particular tastes, but regardless of what the reason is, I think I would, in most cases, much rather have a pub lunch or a nice roast dinner than anything that been anywhere near the word "jus".

I wonder how you refine your palate for things like this? I often contemplate this question when confronted with an impressive-looking cheeseboard, none of which I have the slightest inclination to eat, or am invited to appreciate a salad as being anything more than just bland leaves… or, indeed, as with this evening, am presented with a number of individual ingredients I like by themselves that are smothered with things that I either actively dislike or don't really appreciate in conjunction with the things I do like.

So there you have it. I'm not a foodie. Consequently, I'm something of a cheap date, too.

1237: Is Everything All Right?

Jun 08 -- Is Everything All Right Members of the restaurant industry! Be you serving staff or restaurant owner, know this: my meal is just fine, and thus you don't need to ask me if everything is all right with it. If, on the off-chance, something is actually wrong with my meal, I will attract your attention and explain what the problem is. In the meantime, kindly bugger off and leave me alone.

I know this is an irrational thing to get annoyed about, but it's not so much the thing itself that I find irritating as it is the reason it happens. Because when your waiter/waitress comes over and asks you if everything is all right with your meal, they are not doing so because they care. They are doing so because their restaurant's policy is to go and check up on people five or ten minutes after they have started eating, just in case they're too, I don't know, shy to bring up the fact that their food isn't cooked properly.

I give this information from a position of experience, having worked in a few pubs and restaurants back when I was at university. It was simply policy to do this to make it look like the staff cared when in fact all they really wanted was for all the members of the public to go away so they could enjoy a good old-fashioned apple sauce fight in the kitchen.

I think the knowledge of why this happens — to give the illusion of good customer service, rather than simply to provide good customer service — is what makes it particularly infuriating. If I believed at any point that the people attempting to look like they cared about my dining experience actually did care about my dining experience, I'd be fine with it. However, my mind poisoned by my past experiences on the other side of the customer/staff divide, I just can't see it that way; I just can't believe that these people really give a toss whether or not my meal is to my satisfaction or not.

It's the same with going to shops, of course. That innocuous-sounding "is everything all right there, sir?" can usually be translated as "can I sell you anything, sir?" Checkout operators have stickers on their tills reminding them to thank customers for waiting, and to smile at them. And employees of certain fruit-based computer manufacturers' retail presences have a little "routine" to go through any time they attempt to engage a customer in conversation. (To be fair, in the latter case, it worked quite well, but it's still a completely "false" interaction with another person — speaking from the script rather than from the heart.)

Pish and balls. I guess I'm just grumpy. It is nearly 2AM after all. I should probably go to sleep. It is Sunday tomorrow, then on Monday I am covering E3 professionally for the first time in a while, albeit still only on the "home front" rather than actually going there. One day… one day.

I'll leave you with this.

1231: On Your Doorstep

Jun 02 -- Dessert Something sprang to mind for me and Andie while we were over in Toronto. Our friend Mark was taking us out for lunch to an intriguing little Vietnamese place called Banh Mi Boys that served all manner of interesting sandwiches and meat buns and the like, and we suddenly realised that were the roles reversed, there weren't all that many interesting places we'd be able to take visitors to our fair(ish) city of Southampton.

This evening, then, we went out in an attempt to start rectifying this situation just so, on the off-chance that friends from abroad do come and visit, we'd have somewhere more interesting that Burger King or a Wetherspoons to take them.

We actually visited two different establishments this evening. The first of these was La Cantina (or just Cantina as it appears to be known now) in the Bedford Place area of the city, just on the outskirts of the city centre. This is a Mexican place that I'd heard good things about in the past, but had somehow never made it to. They serve you standard Mexican platters like nachos, burritos and whatnot, but they also do tapas servings of tacos and various other tortilla-based dishes whose names I've forgotten. Andie and I had a sharing platter of nachos with beef mole and two of these tapas dishes each, and that was plenty of food for the pair of us.

It was some tasty food, and a good level of spice — just enough to get you sweating a bit, but not so much that your tongue goes completely numb and you can no longer actually taste what it is you're eating. The beef mole had a bit of a kick, though I suspect this came from the seasoning of the meat rather than the slices of chili pepper that were in it, which actually turned out to be pleasantly mild-ish.

After dinner, we decided to drop into a brand new establishment that has just moved in almost next door to Cantina — Tutti's Gelato. This is, to my knowledge, the second dedicated gelato shop that has opened in Southampton — the first being Sprinkles in "student central" area Portswood.

Tutti's offers a wide variety of gelato flavours, available either as scoops in a cone or little bowl, or as part of a bigger dessert. Said bigger desserts — crepes, waffles, sundaes — all look like they'll probably give you a heart attack, but I most definitely intend to give them a try at some point in the near future, perhaps when I haven't filled myself up with Mexican food beforehand.

My only real criticism of Tutti's — which was clean, looked good, served delicious desserts and had some comfortable seating — was that their menu was riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, and wasn't even consistent about the mistakes they made. If you can correctly pluralise "crepe" into "crepes", then why the fuck did you put an apostrophe in the word "sundaes"? And don't even get me started on how they spelled "raspberries" (hint: it involved an apostrophe, and did not involve the correct "-ies" ending.)

This aside, though — which, after all, isn't really the most important thing (yes, I winced a bit writing that, but it is true) — Tutti's was a great place to go, and I've been all for the "late night dessert" thing ever since I was taken out to a shop that specialised in chocolate-based desserts in New York several years ago. (I can't remember the name, but by God it was amazing. They had a chocolate pizza that looked like instant diabetes.)

Anyway, my rambling point in all this is simply that now, if someone comes to visit, I have two places I can take them. And hopefully we'll discover some more in the near future.

1209: Further Adventures in Fudz

As I noted the other day, one of the fun things about our trip to Toronto is that we've had the opportunity to sample some of the city's more colourful eating establishments. Mark and Lynette both know the places that Torontonians (I bet they hate being called that) visit on a regular basis rather than the inevitably much more expensive touristy places in touristy areas. Consequently, we've had the opportunity to eat well for relatively reasonable prices — Mark and Lynette refer to a $20 bill as a "yuppie food stamp" and it's easy to see why, since the vast majority of meals we've had while we've been here have come out somewhere in the region of $20 each.

We've had a lot of Asian cuisine of various descriptions since we've been here, as I noted the other day. Today I added to the range of Asian foods that I've experienced by having a taste of okonomiyaki. I had no idea whatsoever what okonomiyaki was prior to today, but I had at least heart of it — the character Kirari in the visual novel Kira Kira (which is eminently worth your time, by the way) is obsessed with it.

I was half expecting okonomiyaki to be something similar to takoyaki — the small fried rice flour balls filled with octopus meat and other goo, then drizzled with Japanese mayonnaise. Okonomiyaki is, as it turns out, absolutely nothing like takoyaki. No; rather than being small bite-sized thingies like takoyaki, okonomiyaki is instead somewhat akin to a cross between a potato cake and an omelette, with lashings of a rich barbecue sauce-style substance slathered all over the top of it. I forget exactly what the omelette-type-thing was made from and am far too tired to actually research it at this hour in the morning, but it was quite tasty. Like an omelette, it could also be made with a variety of different fillings, ranging from beef to shrimp or squid. I had a squid one to make up for the fact I didn't have a squid taco at Banh Mi Boys the other day, so I now feel suitably guilty about devouring some of Ika Musume's relatives.

I wasn't quite sure what I was going to make of okonomiyaki, as I was aware going into it that it was made with onions, which those who know me well will know are a vegetable I despise with a great passion. (I had terrible trouble growing up convincing my parents that I really genuinely didn't like onions, despite actually retching at the dinner table when I could taste them on several occasions; the fact that being able to taste onion today still makes me retch makes me feel somewhat vindicated that I wasn't just being an awkward child about them.) Fortunately, however, the onions were shredded up to such a degree (not to mention having had the shit fried out of them) that they were inoffensive to my palate's delicate sensibilities, and consequently there was no retching.

Actually, I enjoyed the okonomiyaki very much. I'm pleased I tried it; I'm not sure it's my favourite of all the Japanese food I've tried to date, but I am happy that I've tasted it and now know what to expect should I find myself ordering it again.

Now all we have to do is complete the "Japanese trifecta" by having sushi one night this week and we'll be all Asianed out.

#oneaday, Day 232: The Big Smoke

I spent the day in London today. Primarily for a job interview, but I also had the good fortune to run into one George Kokoris and one Mitu Khandaker. Well, all right, we'd pre-arranged to meet. But "had the good fortune to run into" sounds so much nicer, doesn't it?

Anyway, the actual reasons I was in London are fairly unimportant for the purposes of this entry. I want to talk about London itself.

London is simultaneously one of the most English places you can be, and one of the most un-English places you can be. Many people who come to visit England begin and end their visits with London. Many of them don't even get outside the city limits of our capital. Which is fair enough; there's plenty to see there, after all.

But the city has a unique character all of its own that isn't replicated anywhere else in the whole country. Sure, there are other big cities, but none quite have the same feeling as London.

It's a combination of things. Not all of them good. First of all, there's the fact that everyone's always in a hurry. Everyone has places to be, things to do and people to see that are far more important than whatever it is you're up to at the time. As a result, God help you if you dare to stand on the left-hand side while you're on an escalator or travelator, as you'll probably end up with someone physically pushing you out of the way, as I witnessed happening to another person earlier. And it's not as if charging down the escalators saves you any more than one or two seconds at most.

Then there's the traffic. I have a complete phobia of driving in London. I've only done it once and have absolutely no intention of ever doing it again. I'm not sure entirely why that is. Again, it's probably an aggression thing. See a light turn amber in preparation of going green and almost immediately horns start beeping and other drivers start getting impatient.

But on the flip side, there's the curious little hideaways that the city offers. Just today, near Waterloo, we wandered down an innocuous and borderline scabby-looking side street only to come across a little row of three lovely restaurants bordered by some gorgeous trees and bushes. Stepping into this restaurant was like escaping reality for a little while. The noise of the city was gone, and we were in a land of Thai curries, Lionel Richie advertising Walkers crisps on the TV, and a selection of R&B and soul from the last twenty years. Most peculiar. And an experience that can't be replicated easily anywhere else.

Somewhere else, somewhere near Regent Street (and I can't remember where, so stop hassling me and stuff) there's an awesome American barbecue and grill place that is pretty much a place where they give you an enormous plate of meat, some implements with which to eat it and the possibility of some bread and/or fries, and then it's up to you how to deal with it.

Then there's the theatres. Scattered around the place, there's hundreds of shows to see, things to do, stuff to enjoy.

It's a bombardment for the senses. And it's utterly exhausting. But I think, today, I came to appreciate it a little for once. Perhaps it was sharing it with other people. Perhaps it was having a sense of purpose for being there. Or maybe it's just one of those changes in my outlook. I couldn't say.

Just remember, though, if you're visiting England or the UK in general, we have a whole lot more to offer than that bustling metropolis!