Flavourist

January is here and dear God it’s just fucking awful isn’t it? The nights are cold, the days are short and there’s absolutely no promise of a Prosecco and Gout filled fortnight off of work and/or real life at the end of it to see us all through. I mean we could, but I for one am still walking around with swollen feet and a blurry memory of everything between December 21st and January 3rd so it may be for the best. Anyway, what’s this post about then? Well, to compound the ongoing misery of the new year, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that hospitality continues to be and in a lot of instances has already reached its breaking point. In the last few weeks we’ve lost the likes of Rocket & Rye, SY23, The Conway and as recently as writing this post, Kindle announced their closure too. Alongside these, some further afield some high profile closures in the form of Copper & Ink (London), The Pig & Whistle (Beverley) and Greens (Manchester) have shone yet another light on the ve...

It has been a bit of a slow second half of the year to be honest. The prevailing reason behind this was due to a period of focus on losing weight, something not particularly conducive with food blogging, especially when most interesting things were tending to pop up in the middle of the week. Saturdays have been my fallow days and I fell into a routine of looking forward to those days so much that I just wanted to eat what I knew I’d love rather than take a chance on anything new for fear of disappointment. Again, an attitude not particularly becoming of a wannabe food blogger. On top of this there has also been apathy. Most recently a sense that I’m shouting into the void and swimming through a sludge of awful takes, bought for likes and restaurants that really should know better than to fall for giving free food to people whose reach extends solely to the likes of MidlandsF00die or ScottishScranBlogFeeds. That's not to say I'm being snobbish about Instagram bloggers. I love t...

Before I get into this post, let’s just take a minute to talk about City Road. I love it; it’s fucking ace. It just is. I can happily admit that it’s not without its issues. If you’re driving, you can spend a good portion of your Saturday evening trying to navigate its chaotic main road or running the gauntlet of its narrow side streets, where if you’re not weaving around pavement-shy punters from the Mackintosh who are 17 Carling’s deep and fresh off the back of a rowdy game of Bowls, you’re almost certainly going to find yourself playing a game of chicken with a ‘20 plate hatchback with blacked-out windows parked up in the middle of the road, hazards on, probably dropping off 2 for 60 or whatever the going rate is these days. All of this in the desperate hope of finding some non-residential parking, though the shards of glass decorating the pavement every hundred meters or so will tell you that there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll end up coming back to a missing window anyway. I’ve liv...