LONDON, MAY 2016 [on Twitter]
⏩ Hi Shahnaz! Just booked your supperclub! Can’t wait! Aaron
⏩ Yay! Look forward to meeting you! 🙂 Shahnaz
⏩ Me too! Just a chance I might be late. I’m a doctor, so never know what the day will bring.
⏩ You’re a doctor? So, this is a bit of a random question – but did you have a relative who was also a doctor in Manchester in the 1970s? My mother has always spoken very fondly of a Doctor Vallance..
Entering this place, it feels like a crime-scene. Except there’s been no crime. Victims maybe, but technically no crime. There was never a police cordon or chalked silhouette on the floor; forensics never dusted the furniture for fingerprints.
After all, the incident never happened here, not within these four walls. Instead, it was committed over the austere pages of a national broadsheet, in a review of this restaurant published this time last year.
If nothing else – and what a lot of angst and hurt and anger that phrase just circumvented – the review told me about Kaki, this place across town that specialises in the cuisines of Sichuan and northeastern China. But to be honest, that really seems the least of it.
It’s not often that a restaurant review gets embroiled in accusations of racism. The first I heard of it was through the maelstrom of distressed and angry tweets that had quickly formed in its slipstream, and which compelled me to read the article for myself to see what the furore was about. View Post
