1Dish4TheRoad
"1 Dish 4 The Road".. Fusing food writing with whatever else I find on the road – fiction, history, poetry, humour, diversity, family stories & London.

Togetherness and Solitude at Tooting UNWINED

Unwined in Tooting Market combines a food kitchen with a wine retailer

There are times in life when it’s just you. Whether by choice or circumstance, you are going it alone. It’s how it is.

And then there are times when someone joins you for the journey. It could be a relatively fleeting moment, a momentary crossing of ways, a connection that somehow touches you and makes you take notice of something you’ve not noticed before, or helps you along your path, whatever that path might be.

And then sometimes there are those that are with you for the long haul. Through thick and thin. Through richer and poorer. Till death do us part. View Post

Potato Latkes at BUBALA; Tackling the Climate Emergency

Potato latkes are the epitomy of Chanukah - and latkes at Bubala are the finest in London

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.”

Greta Thunberg, Davos World Economic Forum, 2019

 

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The year is 160BC. The temple is on fire. The Seleucid Army is threatening to annihilate the Jewish community in ancient Judea, whose existence is poised on a knife-edge. But then come the small plucky band of Maccabees. Through their dedication and self-sacrifice, they manage to repel the might of the empire. Yet when they discover the temple all wrack and ruined, hearts turn from joy to sorrow: there’s barely a drop of oil to keep the sacred flame alive.

But this drop miraculously ends up lasting for a whole eight days. And so this story is celebrated – year after year, century after century – as Chanukah, the festival of lights. To remember how a community saved themselves against extinction. And how one little light fought against the dark for so long. View Post

Curry & Kneidlach: A Tale of Two Immigrant Families ( – by Shahnaz Ahsan and Aaron Vallance)

Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in a family photo

 

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..

 

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KAKI, One Year On

Kaki, review of a restaurant in London serving Sichuan and northeastern Chinese food

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

Bao at DADDY BAO; Fathers, Sons & Bedtime Stories

Shittake mushroom bao is an umami hit at Daddy Bao in Tooting.
I remember when it all came to an end. I was 13 years old, much older than I cared to admit to my friends at the time. And when it was all over, my dad and I took a while to come to terms with our shared loss.

For that was the moment – sorely conflicted, but with my mind decidedly made-up – that I told my dad the time had come: from now on, there’d be no more bedtime stories.
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