Foreign objects

For lunch today I went and bought a salad with lots of A's in it; arugala, asparagus, avocado. They didn't have any artichoke, but they made up for this omission by including a hair.

Year of Eating Differently (108): Cafe San Valentino's, Greek Street

Only discovered this place this morning, despite it having the ambience of being around for years. Shades of the Bielefeld Conspiracy, perhaps? Anyway, it's a pretty centrally located cafe, but with a paucity of customers, which meant I got served without having to fight through a scrum of people first. Quite strange, given it's just a street or two away from both Dean Street and Charing Cross Road, but the (misplaced) wisdom of crowds can be a difficult thing to discern.
Toasted brie sandwich. Generous with the salad. Pretty slow service, given it was only me and some woman asking for her lunch. On the other hand, a polite request will provide you with honey in your tea. If I were thinking of revisiting here any time soon, that might be useful information.

Year of Eating Differently (105): The Breakfast Club, D'Arblay Street

We were meant to be eating at Pierre Victoire today, but because it seems that every Friday my lunchtime companions are rushing to get back for an important meeting, and because one of them had got tanked up at a Valentine's Night extravaganza on Regent Street and stank of alcohol, nobody was brave enough to take a whole hour out. Plus P-V would be packed full of lunchtime punters who probably eat lunch in the same place from day to day and therefore don't have that monkey on their back of desperation to notch up another meal every day.
Because of last night's booze (not me, I was at home reading a book and watching Ashes to Ashes with one eye, unimpressed for the second week and hoping it was going to improve) we also ruled out the pub on Broadwick Street, couldn't get into a brand new hot dog restaurant because it was having an opening party that was invitation only (surely I should have told them who I was and blagged my way in), and thus ended up at the Breakfast Club round the corner.
Unfortunately, service here is damnably slow because it's always packed. One of our number is dying of a hangover, the kind that makes you want to start crying and crawl under the table, the other two are gabbling away about sexual mores and whether you should put out on the third date or not (should you put out on a first date? should you ever not put out on a first date?), and possibly these two things offend the woman behind the counter.
I order a goats cheese, rocket and mushroom wrap, a packet of garlic flavoured crisps and a couple of date and cranberry cookies. PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THAT.
Pay close attention, because if you ever end up at the Breakfast Club, listening to the (possibly) ironic soundtrack from Footloose, don't ever order any of those three things. It was like an infernal triptych of awful food - the garlic crisps were revolting, the cheese was like a deposit of something and as for the cookies, the forlorn hope I had that they could cheer me up after the other two was cruelly dashed to the floor when they turned out to taste like sweetened MDF. Not too good.

Year of Eating Differently (96): Flavour, Brewer Street

Apparently it's "food that loves you"; that is constituted by a plastic encased salad, an eton mess (first time I've seen that in Soho, and no, that's not call for a dirty joke about Compton's or any other bar) and a packet of crisps.
Rather OTT on non-sustainables - no matter how smug Pret may be about telling you that you don't have to take their napkins, it's a bit better than Flavour giving me copious plastic cutlery, bags, plastic packaging and napkins. But hey, they have their heart in the right place, right? Or at least three doors down from a strip joint. Today they had a giant man outside with a jug of coffee, offering free caffeine to the masses - doubt that will last long. But he was very tall, if that makes any difference to one's meal choice.

Salad is pretty good - actually tastes of something and the pasta isn't limp like you sometimes get. The eton mess is ok... but then what's difficult? You bung some cream and some berries together with some smashed up meringue. Disappointingly, watery fluid in the bottom of the pot - but possibly this is one of those things that's better if it's not prepared far in advance...

Year of Eating Differently (65): Cafe Lido, Dean Street

I was expecting to be disappointed. The outside looks ok (diagonally opposite to a bright green sex shop, nice) but inside it was a little dingy, and the waitress seems incapable of understanding my request for a vegetarian panini. (Or panino, rather, but I'm not getting into all that all over again.)
Had a salad in the end, which was actually very good, although wholly unsuitable for the cold day. Also a latte, which tasted burnt, and which I wasn't very pleased about.

So satisfactory, but apart from me and the two serving staff, there was only one other person in there, and that tends to ruin any sense of life. Fish in the tank were quite good though.

Year of Eating Differently (49): Subway, Dean Street

Long before this project started, I had the misfortune to go to the (now-defunct) Subway in the corner of Soho Square, where I had a sandwich so bland as to be offensive; I retaliatated by going to Make Mine for a few more monotonous months of filthy oil, and lo and behold the franchisee shut down. Sorry about that, but a cheese sub with nothing in it but cheese is something you should have refused to serve me, rather than pollute your brand values. Sometimes the customer is not right, and should be told.
So it was with some trepidation that I stepped out today and realised that Subway was on the menu. First I had to post something to Sweden, which necessitated hanging about in the post office for half my lunch hour, and then I had the whole Post Office depot between me and the Subway just north of Soho Square, so I ended up in the more fashionable environs on Dean Street. Slightly confused that the decor of all Subway has to include bare brick walls, slightly more confused that one of the guys behind the counter had a t-shirt designed to look like he was wearing a Hawaiian lei, and too frightened/cautious/reticent/introverted to ask to take proof.
That got out the way, was swiftly upsold from a 6 inch to a foot long sub, with a vegetable patty and cheese in it. The salad garnish is uninspired (sliced lettuce, tomato, cucumber, olives, sweetcorn, onions) yet utilitarian, so I paid (half the price of yesterday's meal) and made it back to the office.

Where I took this photo, which suggests to me that either I'm exploiting perspective for my own personal gains, orI have respectably LARGE HANDS, or that a foot isn't what it used to be.
And so to the sandwich. It stinks. This is a good thing, because it pollutes the office and annoys the drones around me who don't have their own eating-lots-of-different-things blog. And also it stinks in a good way, redolent of going to Pizza Hut at the age of 12 and then annoying your parents by (in full snotty-nosed child mode) refusing to eat "anything with tomato on it". Must be that mixture of oregano and every other herb they've flung on the bread that's provoking this Proustian type memory. Now where did I leave that madeleine?
The vegetable patty (what does that really mean? Anyone?) has the consistency of a fish finger that has been squashed flat between two volumes of an encyclopeadia (of the sort the father of my friend Barry Sheen used to hawk around post-war Germany, before selling hip replacements, but that really is another story) but has satisfying mouth feel. The salad I referred to just now is mostly extraneous, being swamped by both the texture and the flavour of the bread and the patty, and altogether it's a good, warming meal. Subway, I think you have redeemed yourself. Chapeau!
The astute amongst you may have noticed the worrying preponderance of Gallic references in today's post. (If anyone is actually reading this, that is.) This is mainly due to my brainwave today of having 'Ceci n'est pas une projet d'optimisation search-engine' as the title of the blog, and then realising that would be a mindbogglingly dense and probably quite unoriginal thing to do, as well as possibly self-effacing (see earlier)

Year of Eating Differently (41): Cafe Soho, Ingestre Place

Really, really impressed. Small unit, with three or four tables pushed up at the far end of the room, and all your orders taken on the spot and made there and then by a cheerful chap or two. Because it's tucked away a bit, less frenetic than Make Mine, say, and if you choose to sit down, then they bring you your sandwich on a plate, which always makes it feel more like a meal.

Sandwich itself - well, I was feeling unadventureous after the nauseating meals I've had for the last two days, so just a baguette with brie and lots and lots of salad, but the selection of drinks is very impressive; had some kind of goji berry drink with ginger, which, while not wholly successful, made a good change.
Did stop off at the newsagent on the way back to the office to buy some Frazzles though. And remarked upon the fact that I live in Soho, which is a somewhat concerning Freudian slip; are the hours in the office really that long?

Year of Eating Differently (12): Vital Ingredient, Berwick Street

Time was, when salad was something you got with 'shome shauce?' from your friendly kebab van, at 2 in the morning after you'd left some god-awful club. But we all grow up and stop being students eventually. And after years of fat-filled sandwiches, we feel guilty enough to eat a salad for lunch instead. Never mind real men don't eat quiche - just vegetables? It seems insane.
Get over that, and you're half the way to losing your self. But never mind such existential worries. Vital Ingredient is based around the innovative concept of choosing what you want in your salad. Since obviously nobody had ever thought of asking for what they want before. Then it gets tossed on the production line by one of the salad drones, and handed back to you in a plastic tub.
So I've got pasta, peas, olives, cucumber, tomato, and (in place of sundried tomatoes) 'sunblush' tomatoes - is it a brand? Is it just embarrassed by the sun? Who knows? Anyway, it's quite clean, rather than the filth I've been knocking back for the last week, so at least my poor body will thank me for eschewing burgers and such this week. At least until dinnertime...