There are no-frills counter seating eateries, Michelin-starred restaurants, bakeries, yakitori joints where beer and sake are drunk around the griddle, izakayas where the food complements the drinks, noodle places with their little vending machines from which you order, performance restaurants, street stalls, markets. And all these seem to all sit on top of each other, there to confuse you with enticing smells and Japanese-only menus.
The menu is utterly confident in its use of offal and traditional Chinese ingredients in the most innocent looking parcel: a steamed bun.
But food in Rome is somewhere else. It's crispy, fried supplìs with their melty mozzarella heart, in a brown bag rendered translucent by oil, eaten in tiny cobblestoned alleyways, green vines climbing up earth-coloured walls. It's squares of chewy pizza al taglio, the edges crispy, pockets of mozzarella atop delicate courgette flowers.
Imagine this: you’re tired. You’re hungover. The world is too loud, the light too bright and the air too warm and heavy for you to even think about leaving the…
But is this who I want to be? A maker of smoothies, a drinker of lukewarm lemon water, a calorie-counting kombucha-sipping consumer of kale and sweet potato, a self-righteous enemy of white foods by day.
Here is part 2 of my year in food. You can find part 1 here. – Food at Som Saa because it was genuinely some of the best I have…
New Year’s day. Time to try out that new smoothie maker you got for Christmas. Have you been to the gym yet? Me neither. But yes, definitely tomorrow. Definitely. Kale…
Most of my meals are eaten at my desk, straight from the Tupperware, its cover gently dipping in the middle, battered by too many runs in the microwave. Others are…
