July 24, 2025

Something to eat

Hello,

Sorry for the double newsletter but I needed to get this sent in time for The Session deadline. A concept my former editors are probably laughing at given my total lack of respect for any deadline previously forced into my path.

But this was a good opportunity to talk about something exciting I’ve been working on since I took over The Royal Oak, which is that: we’re getting food. Well, a kitchen. Where we’re going to make food.

David (whose post about Yard Sale’s ubiquity is linked above) may be pleased to know I dug my heels in and refused to entertain the concept of pizza. Why? People like pizza, after all. Well, for one thing, there’s a Pizza Hut about 15 feet away from my pub that actually does really good pizza and I wouldn’t really want to try and compete with and the other thing is that I used to work for Wetherspoons.

I’m not absolutely sure when (sometime in the mid-teenthousands) but somewhere around the same time Wetherspoons got an absolute horn on for flavoured gin, every single Spoons in the country was fitted out with pizza equipment. Has anyone ever gone to a Spoons and said “damn I wish I could get a pizza?” Maybe. But probably not a lot of people.

The pizzas are made with dough that’s defrosted and pressed using a pizza dough iron thing that takes up more space than you can possibly imagine in a kitchen and is extremely faffy to clean. Then, depending on the kitchen, you might either have a specialist pizza oven or a Rational working overtime to get the things out.

People do order pizzas, it certainly happens, probably a lot of Spoons do tens to hundreds a day. Somewhere like St Pancras I’d guess they’ve got someone constantly throwing them out. I ate Spoons food for at least one meal a day (complimentary staff feeding) nearly every single day for over a year and so eventually I got round to the pizzas and they’re absolutely fine. There’s even a vegan cheese option and if you get the naga chilli dip and pour it over anything it’ll taste good.

I did a lot of closes, though. In fact I can probably say I’m one of the country’s leading experts on shutting down a Spoons for the night and so - in many different pubs of many different sizes and in different regions of London cus my god I got bussed around a bit - every single one was chucking away pizza ingredients at the end of the night.

Ok a small amount of mozzarella isn’t going to break the pub finances. But a whole load of ham, if it’s happening repeatedly, is the sort of thing that gets bothersome. To have a range of pizzas you need a range of toppings and they all have to be fresh and you need to defrost an excess of dough and you’re going to end up throwing some away.

Kitchen waste, on a commercial level, isn’t the environmental disaster it is on the domestic. On a very local and financial level, though, it’s the absolute fucking enemy - especially while rising produce costs are cutting into margins. Working for Spoons taught me many things about economies of scale and one of them is that if Big Timmy can’t make pizza work without wastage then I sure as fuck am not going to manage it.

Also - and somewhere deep in my heart - I don’t think pizza belongs in pubs. Which is the sort of irrational thing I can definitely force myself past if I thought there was a really compelling business reason but the rise of pub pizza has really skirted past me. Sometimes when it’s done right it’s great - there’s a brilliant pub in East Ham that does excellent pizza for very fair prices, it’s been years since I’ve gone in but at least in 2020 I’m pretty sure it was still only just over a tenner per pizza.

But I do feel like you’ve got to lean into a hipster thing I don’t know how to to make it fit into the fabric of a pub. And that something about pizza makes it less like a boozer and more like a bar. Which there’s nothing wrong with but in a pub on such a gigantic, extremely old-school scale as mine I just can’t quite imagine being able to grow a mustache trendy enough to carry it off.

I am in no danger of succumbing to the temptations of Yard Sale, far out in DA8. We don’t know what Yard Sale is in these parts. Do I, only seven months after moving out of Peckham, sometimes wish for a Yard Sale pizza? Eh not really there is the really good Pizza Hut across the road that makes the vegan hot properly nuclear. The last time I was tempted was during their bizarre link-up with Italian-based Formula 1 team Visa Cash App Racing Bulls and that was totally out of confusion about what the hell was going on.

Anyway, so. If not pizza then what? Other countries definitely have the concept of “drinking food” - in the UK that amounts to two packets of scampi fries and perhaps a delicate second course of salt and vinegar crisps a lot of the time. Or at least, did when I first started drinking in pubs and most of them didn’t really do food.

Actually that’s a lie. When I first started drinking in pubs some of them did a very limited number of things and those were basically: burger and chips or chips. Maybe cheesy chips. Probably pie was somewhere in there but has never been my go-to.

I am not a hungry drunk. I don’t get the late-night urge to suddenly eat something that other people get. Sober, sure, I will be snacking before bed but if I’ve had a few I’m absolutely not interested.

In a pub, though. If there’s, say, fresh, hot chips and salt and vinegar and perhaps the option of adding some slices of bread and butter to put those in? Hello, what a perfectly adequate weeknight dinner. More than adequate, fucking banging if I am to be honest.

So: let’s start with chips. A safe, cheap to make, cheap to buy, easy to do option. You need a deep-fat fryer and potatoes. Contrary to the experience of anyone who’s ever paid like £8 for stone-cold slabs at the British Grand Prix or a freezing football ground it is not actually difficult to do chips and do them well.

If you’re doing chips you might as well do cheesy chips. And if you’re doing cheesy chips you might as well do burgers. Decent burgers aren’t hard to do, either; hand-fashion the patties, use decent salad and sauces, keep things reasonably simple and just do the odd special.

Throw in some onion rings and some nuggets and you’ve got a fairly good menu. Keep Jamie Oliver away from your door by offering to swap the chips with salad if people want.

Are pub burgers over? Probably. I don't really think food trends matter all that much if you're not trying to be the next Meat Liquor (a concept so passé I'm sure most current foodies would recoil from it) and I'm unlikely to do that from Zone 6. So: food you can price reasonably, that's not hard to make and decently good it is.

So far so sensible. Then for some reason my area manager mentioned scotch eggs and my brain fell down a hole to a years-ago visit to Mexico City (my last Mexico EPrix) and going to Paramo/El Parnita with a load of Formula E people. Normally I just ate street food in Mexico because it's cheap and extremely good but this was a proper hipster restaurant where my functional Spanish suddenly came into good use. Although it definitely has since been discovered by tourists the hipsters this place were attracting at the time were MXCD’s own and we all stuck out like a bunch of freaks trying desperately to get a table while the queue outside the door built up.

When we did we got a range of amazing tacos that were exactly the sort of creative riffs on the format you only get when it's being done by people whose cuisine it is. You're probably wondering where this is going and the answer is: scotch egg taco.

It was maybe the one thing that was a little bit disappointing. Very much just a scotch egg in a taco which isn't bad but wasn't as elevated as everything else, for a concept I can definitely get behind. I've thought a lot since about how I'd do it if I did it. Sausagemeat (probably with black pudding) fried up and seasoned, on a soft taco. Fried egg and ground up pork scratchings (or chicharrons in Mexico I guess) and if I happened to be doing this on The Great British Menu or something little spherifications of garlicky-hot tomato sauce on top of that.

Needless to say, I'm not doing that in a pub kitchen. Well, not every weekend. Ok maybe I'll do it. But either way, tacos are one of those ultimate foods for being made without a ton of equipment and I can't get the concept out of my head now. I've needed to do something to up traffic to the pub on Tuesdays for ages and it's just too tempting…

Needless to say they'd need to be done well. And not make any claims to authenticity, obviously, given my entire connection to them is eating them. But it's another thing that, like burgers, it's relatively easy to do multiple dietary versions of and even easy to make gluten free.

Which is why I got started asking if “tater tacos” was an offensive or self-acknowledging way of saying my tacos de papas won't be from a family recipe. (The Mexican jury declared it “very funny”) But they will be fresh from the fryer and three for less than a fiver.

So maybe I am a hipster after all. Just one with a massive, irrational bias about the concept of a slice of pizza being dangled near a pint glass. (And by extension, the glass wash I have to clean out…)

Anyway that's enough spamming everyone for the week, who knows when I'll write one of these again.

Hazel