aa gill on airports

[Ken Gargett]

love the columns this bloke does. this one on a new restaurant in new york, the john dory - he is far more positive than usual - but i liked the stuff on airports at the beginning.

At the top of the list of subjects no columnist should ever inflict on the trusting reader is “My experience in an airport”. (It’s not quite top; it’s just below “Oh my God, we’ve been burgled and all they sent me was a crime liaison officer”, “My daughter’s infant-school teacher doesn’t know the difference between disinterested and uninterested” and “Here’s my comforting soup recipe on behalf of testicular cancer”.)

I rather love airports. I like their permanent state of transience. I like the heightened emotion, the expectation. They are caravanserai oases. They are a Milky Way destination: a place between places that doesn’t spoil your appetite for travel. I think hating airports is a snobby affectation, showing off a world-weary traveller’s ennui. It’s not attractive, and it makes me think of the departure lounge in Johannesburg, where families and football clubs, penny-whistle bands, a cappella quartets and occasionally whole villages arrive, all Sunday-smart, to wave goodbye to boys in new suits with hard briefcases and severe haircuts. For most of the world, airports are the portals of hope and advancement and anticipation and amazing good luck. There are no small journeys or little emotions in Third World airports.

You know the rule of departure queues: the longer the line, the better natured and politer the queue. Economy disappears into the distance, made up of passive people chatting quietly and reading books. Business class is 15 snappy irked souls, hissing at stroppily overdressed toddlers and kicking too much matched suede luggage with a pursed fury. The first-class desk, with its vase of real flowers, has a queue of one: a woman carrying a £4,000 handbag, venting a tantrum that would shame a dyspraxic two-year-old in Hamleys. Airports are anthologies of parables, illuminating the eternal truths of humanity, one of which is: the greater the luxury, privilege and entitlement, the greater the self-pity, disappointment, blame and anger. Martin Amis pointed out that if you walk the length of a plane, you’ll notice that the quality of the literature is in inverse relationship to the legroom. At the back, by the bogs, it’s Penguin Classics and new translations of Finnish magic realism. You travel up through television adaptations, historical fiction, romances, chick lit, molester childhoods, until you get to the beds in first, where it’s Hello! and Jeffrey Archer.

The other source of disproportionate First World rage is the security check, where they no longer bother to tell you what you have to take off, unpack or leave behind. You go through the chuppah of explosive purity, as the conveyor belt takes 15 buckets of your clothes and personal belongings, like some life-or-death game of pelmanism. The shoes, belts, watches, coins, keys, phones, toothpaste, jackets and hats we knew about; but one man was thrown off a flight for having a tennis racquet. He went to the European Court of Justice to complain. Nobody had told him — they’d mentioned guns, acid, lighter fluid, fireworks, matches, compressed gas, ammonia, baseball bats and pool cues — but not tennis racquets. Well, it transpired there’s a secret European Union list of things it doesn’t allow on aeroplanes but didn’t tell us about. The court reluctantly agreed that a man can’t be punished for breaking a law that’s been purposely hidden from him.

So, from the continent that brought you Kafka, Ionesco and Lewis Carroll, let me reveal to you the secret baggage-handlers’ list of things you can’t carry onto an aeroplane but never knew. A set of cookie-cutters in the shape of aeroplanes. A stuffed lion’s head or canada goose. A loaded Scotsman. A cactus with spines greater than 3cm in length. A folded business-class seat. A ventriloquist’s dummy or Guy Fawkes. Spring-loaded mousetraps. A bicycle pump. An electronic fart machine. A conductor’s baton. An auctioneer’s gavel, a prosthetic penis without a doctor’s certificate, or an exposed profanity.

My flight to New York was delayed for 45 minutes while they removed the luggage of a woman who’d called a security guard an arsehole. We sat politely in the crunched-up literary seats, and prayed it was the ***** from first class with the £4,000 bag. I bet she was livid for getting turfed off an aeroplane, having to be told off by a customer anger facilitator and spending another four hours in an airport, all for calling some big bloke in a uniform an arsehole. If she’d known, at least she could have called him a suppurating sphincter-faced poxed toothpick-pricked moronic dribbling lackey loser of an arsehole.

We arrived in New York on the most auspicious day. For the first time ever, I walked through immigration with nary a queue. That’s a happy ending that even Richard Curtis couldn’t have imagined. It was also the day that New York officially became more expensive than London. A year ago, who’d have predicted that? New York was the Wag’s Woolies, a superpower bazaar with cheesecake. Jumbos of orange Cheshire ladettes would cackle into Manhattan, buy an iPod and make back the price of the ticket. Now all the fair-trade fair-weather friends have stayed home, and New York is brilliant and blue and chilly in its new austerity.

I lived here at the end of the last depression, in the late 1970s. It was grimly marvellous, and in all the years since, I have never been depressed or unhappy here.

New York must have more restaurants per head than anywhere else in the world. Nobody cooks at home; they never give dinner parties. Only the Anglophiles own kettles. But catering is tough all over. At the moment, restaurants are running on empty. Still, new ones are opening. This is a city that is generically pessimistic and specifically optimistic, Jewish and Irish. One of the best new arrivals is The John Dory, the sister restaurant to The Spotted Pig. The Pig has been consistently fêted and packed and starred. It’s an English foodie pub on three floors, where I’ve had some memorably good times, in particular a gluttonously out of control evening with Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, Marco Pierre White and Carole Radziwill.

The chef at the Pig, April Bloomfield, once worked at The River Café, but her influences and dishes owe more to St John and Fergus Henderson. The food is marvellously traditional English revival, with Yankee additions, such as a proper burger and brunch. The John Dory is the seashore version. A fish restaurant that’s English-inspired, in the sense that it goes down to the sea in waders and a sou’wester, not a leopardprint bikini and suntan cream. This is cod-fisted, fishy-fingered food, made with panache and a big mouth.

The room is small and dark and jumbled with drinkers and lechers. There are only a handful of tables; we ate in a small back room, where you can see the action but also hear your neighbour. I was there with four girls, and the table of three bankers next to us obviously thought that was way too much woman for one ancient poncey limey, so sent over a bottle of champagne. My chicks smiled with glacial politeness, and the bankers left in silence. The waiter said, with some awe: “You’re English, right? That was real old-world rejection. A proper posh brush-off.” I gave him a look. No, that is a proper posh brush-off.

I had some terrific baby squid, and some perfectly creamy cod milts on toast (that’s sperm, not eggs). A sweet, ozony picked crab, and an immaculate fish stew, like Neptune’s breakfast. This is a million nautical miles from most of the fish you get in America, which tends to be either breaded bits or treated as a branch of Japanese millinery, with off-white, tepid flavours. The New York critics have all raved about the Dory’s steamed treacle pudding for two. It’s made with butter, not suet, so it’s really a warm sponge with syrup, which is a perfectly nice thing. A decade ago, who’d have thought there’d have been an indigenous reinvigoration of industrial-revolution food? Who’d have imagined all those slow-cooked extremities would be eaten as anything but a historical re-enactment, or a dare? And who’d have thought we’d be exporting classic English cuisine abroad, and who could have guessed that it would be in New York that you'd get some of the best English food available, and that it would cost the same as in Shoreditch?

[El Presidente]

Great read Ken

[Rogers72]

I particularly enjoyed this bit...

"Airports are anthologies of parables, illuminating the eternal truths of humanity, one of which is: the greater the luxury, privilege and entitlement, the greater the self-pity, disappointment, blame and anger. "