Year of Eating Differently (126): Ebeneezers, Central

Wonderful thing - Cream Soda is alive and well in Hong Kong. First time I've seen that in about 20 years. Falafel wrap is pretty decent too - reasonably dirty, quite hot.

Year of Eating Differently (99): Fresh & Wild, Brewer Street

Strangely, it's taken this long to overhear somebody say "What I need is a damn fine coke habit" whilst on the street. Given that I work in Soho, it's surprising that it's been nigh on 20 weeks without somebody saying something like this. Are they referencing Twin Peaks? Do they feel they have too much money? Oh, the mysteries.
Feeling a bit deathly today - went to shorinji kempo last night and then back to the office to ponder the wonders of the world with an American accomplice, until we realised the reason that 1 + 1 != 2 was because one of us was holding the map upside down, or similar for those of you that aren't database geeks.

Staggered out today, got lost in Fresh & Wild for five minutes trying to find a sandwich, purchased this diminutive falafel wrap. Good falafel, nice and fresh with lots of hummous, but still a bit prepackaged to really rate as one of the greats.
However, on the way back stopped at Mrs Kibble's Olde Sweet Shoppe and spanked down more than a tenner on sugar mice and crystallised ginger. Ah, happy days when there are sweets.
[falafel]

Year of Eating Differently (93): Mizuna, Charlotte Street

It looks from the outside as though it might sell nothing but salad. And they do indeed have a makeshift bar at the back of the shop for you to have salad made up. But I'm in a hurry and don't have sufficient brain space to deal with making decisions about what to eat. So I grabbed a falafel wrap that turned out to be possibly the messiest meal I've had this year - kept spilling crumbs down inside my sleeve. Otherwise, ok, but almost instantly forgettable.

Year of Eating Differently (90): Med Kitchen, St Anne's Court

Nestled next to a tiny internet cafe, a barbers that offers free pints of beer with your haircut on Fridays (what would you infer about the quality of their workmanship from that) and an overpriced avant-garde shop selling trainers, is this perfectly example of a kebab shop. Inside it's all overbright fluorescent lighting, a plastic menu, two donners rotating on spits, a couple of guys from the Med wearing bandannas, all the usual stuff that you'd need on a Friday night after you've been kicked out the pub. Strange, then, to find it sprouting fully-formed in Soho, particularly in the middle of the day.
Still, it was doing a roaring trade, and one could hardly complain about the absence of vomitting drunks in the doorway. Got a generously sized flatbread full of falafel and salad for £3.80, scurried back to the office and was full of food in less than 20 minutes from start to finish. A good efficient use of time and money.
Still fancy eight pints of Stella, mind...

Year of Eating Differently (73): Leon, Great Marlborough Street

Cold, cold day today, made worse by the shower at work not having any hot water. I'm not sure if that was a plan to make my morning more invigorating (thank you, Land Securities) or just a plain old cock-up. Never mind.

Made the trek over to Leon today to get a felefal wrap and an orange juice. Both smaller than I expected, but the wrap has a good meaty taste to it. Who am I fooling? It will have been 11 years to the day tomorrow that I abjured meat (and fish, and chicken...) and still I miss the stuff. Oh woes! Still, at least it means I'm more likely to eat enough vegetables (apart from when I spent three months in Ashford, Kent, eating nothing but margarita pizzas).
Peace out for 2007...

Year of Eating Differently (59): Maezo, Old Compton Street

Again, it was a cold and miserable day, so we wandered down to Old Compton Street, where I could cheer myself up by looking in the window of Skinny White Boy before going back for a two-hour HR briefing on how to fill in forms. I was expecting another small cafe, but then the blinding bright green frontage of Maezo attracted us, and we wandered in. By the look of it the place had been open a week, although the woman behind the bar assured us it had been there for 6 years.
As the picture above shows, their brand seems to be a bit ... well, possibly overtargetted to their environs. I don't want to be crude, but the mouth of the guy on the left, and the whole singlet thing the guy on the right is into; it's just a bit too ashamedly rough trade for lunchtime. (I could digress here into the unpleasantness of Georgina's in the Covered Market in Oxford [it 'oozes sex' apparently] but we'll leave that treat for another day.)
Anyway, Maezo does felafel, in pitta with salad, but for some strange reason they're called maezo instead. Possibly this is to distinguish them from 'the runner up prize' when you go to a kebab shop and everyone else is eating sliced elephant leg. But you also get chips, which is a nicetie. All good, but the construction is a bit overwrought - first you order, then you get your felafel in a little pitta with a cardboard holder, and then you go back along the counter to pick out your own salad and add that in, at which point you're having to galumph through the lunchtime queue and then double back on yourself to sit down. So not very well thought out by a time-and-motion standard.
It is good felafel though - high on the dirtiness stakes, and unlike Cafe Arlington yesterday it has the right ratio of bread to filth. Good selection of salads, although I wimped out of the beetroot. Chips were possibly a bit much - felt like I was going to burst while listening to the intricacies of career appraisals half an hour later...

Year of Eating Differently (58): Cafe Arlington, Dean Street

I went to the bank today, and outside there was a Welshman begging by the ATM. Had mixed feelings about this - lots of people were handing him change, and it was cold, and he was missing a few teeth, and could possibly do with some money, but on the other hand you don't spend the best part of a year detailing the iniquities of charity for your MA dissertation and then feel you have to justify not giving somebody cash just because they asked for it.
However, things got further confused when I went up the street to Cafe Arlington. Pretty empty inside and devoid of atmosphere (partly due to the lack of customers, and partly because of the scaffolding outside blocking the view) but before I went in and got my felafel and roasted pepper panino (there's a confluence of cultures...) I didn't realise it was run as an effort to give the homeless and those who find it hard to find work some kind of job.
Not that morality and ethical aspects should shape what the food tastes like. Beneath this unprepossessing exterior lurks a heart of darkness, etc etc. But - well, not bad. No queue because I was the only customer (have they not got a good location? possibly not - people will walk out of Soho Square and demonstrate the human tendency to turn right rather than left, which rather disadvantages the establishment) so I got served quickly. Bread was rubbish - not panini at all, but what appears to be a baguette - but the combination of that with felafel and roasted peppers makes for some good, sweaty dirty lunchtime fare. So they got away with it this time.

Year of Eating Differently (55): Abokado, Newman Street

Miso soup - hmmph. Not strong enough. It was homemade though. That's what the factory-made container had written on it.
Also, a felafel wrap, which seems to have given me slight indigestion.
Whole place put me in a bad mood, but that may be because I'd just gone to the Post Office next door (to buy a stamp for a postcard to Donegal) and somehow the Post Office always makes me disgruntled. Otherwise, ok. Not really worth the long walk up there unless you were desperate to get away from Soho, I'd have to say.

Year of Eating Differently (21): Smollensky's Burgershack, Charing Cross Road

From the outside it looks a bit like a dirty burger joint, but this is probably because everything on Charing Cross Road looks filthy after about five minutes. Inside it's all dark colours, frosted glass and bare metal - upmarket diner? Dodgy strip club? Who knows?

Anyway, burger is very very good - spicy as, and despite looking like a dog's breakfast (I thought they hadn't cooked the felafel and had just chucked a load of paste into a bun, but that was the hummus on top) it went down a treat. The bun, on the other hand, was pretty awful - flavourless, dry and generally unremarkable.
Chips? Hmmph. Here's my bone of contention. If I'm having a burger and I order 'skinny fries' off the menu, that's what I expect to get. Not great big hoofing fat chip-shop chips, which is what I get, and which doesn't seem quite right. Apart from that they were quite competent, so what was the vibe they were going for? Fat potato obsessed pranksters? Upmarket downmarketeering? Who knows. I'll pop back on the 24th of September next year, and see if they get it right.

Year of Eating Differently (18): Planet Organic, Torrington Place

Off to get my dissertation bound today, so stopped off on the way back from the University of London Union and went into this organic/healthfood store. Picked up a plastic wrapped felafel wrap (certainly a leitmotif of this project, but the first one to be so suffused in quality polluting packaging), some crisps (or at least I thought they were crisps, but more careful perusal of the packet suggests they've been baked and are made from rice, so they're probably utterly disgusting) and finally a bar of Green & Blacks chocolate (recently acquired by the chocolate behemoth that is Cadburys, so there goes their 'alternative' credentials). Now I'm thinking how foul the rest of this meal is probably going to be, I'm kicking myself for not getting the giant bar of ginger flavoured Green & Blacks when I had the chance...

Year of Eating Differently (4): Pret A Manger, Frith Street

In a hurry today because of a morning spent dallying in Croydon (Gateway to the South) so no time for dirty burger. This makes a boy sad. Plus, the lunchtime queues in the sandwich shops on Dean Street made getting anything and getting back to my desk for a 2pm call quite impractical.
So for a second day, I'm eating felafel. This time from Pret: a spicy falafel melt.
Surprisingly, this is a lot better than yesterday's offering: much dirtier. There's some sort of spicy tomato sauce in there that's almost curry like in flavour, and the whole thing's warm rather than cold. OK, the wrap itself is a little brittle (probably been sitting there for quite some time, nicely hardening up) but that combination of chickpea, cheese and spicy filth means it's an acceptable hardship.
£3.50. Reestablished some faith in Pret to produce food with a bit of flavour (vs the green goo they call an avocado wrap, the over-refridgerated brie baguette, etc etc...)

Year of Eating Differently (3): Just Felafs, Wardour Street

My appetite for felafel is difficult to diminish. Last August I spent a week in Stockholm, surrounded by a multiplicity of different cuisines. And what did I eat? Felafel, at least once a day. One day, I ate felafel four times. Admittedly, the dirty felafel store was just around the corner from the bar where we were drinking, which increased its allure, but proximity is not enough. There has to be that terrible feeling of transgression, that the reformed chickpeas you're cramming into your gob are in some way wrong.
Just Felafs, unfortunately, instead of going for the junk-food-you-can-eat-in-a-kebab-house-when-you're-vegetarian vibe, tries to be all clean and nice. Ethical, even. There's a sign on the wall about how they recycle their glass bottles and run the place on wind-powered electricity. They're still flogging cans of Coke though - how does the big corporation fit into all of that? Pricing has changed recently, in such a way that you can't figure out the menu without a man explaining it to you item by item, but what is there to say? You get some felafels stuck in a wrap, some veg in there, a bit of hummous. If you were adventurous, you might choose something with a terrible pun for a name. I just had the FLT - Felafel, Lettuce & Tomato. It's a bit bland - previously, they made every one on request, so you could load up with chilli sauce, but now they're pre-wrapped and ready for take-away, you don't get the same zing.
And sadly, that's it. Filling, but a bit dull, and for £5.75 that's quite a lot to ask, especially when it's all ethical and moral. When you've a job in advertising/selling bombs/flooding emerging markets with cheap cigarettes you need some filthy food to take your mind away from the dirty mess your life has become. You need a dirty burger. Which leads us to tomorrow...