Oedipus Lex

I am a hard work­ing chap; I read a lot of blawgs, news web­sites and I am a healthy fre­quenter of Twit­ter. I also read case law, text books and journal art­icles. True, I am not paid to do this but I make a fair bit of money for my com­pany and feel they should indulge me. It appears, how­ever, that they don’t see things like this. Very far fuck­ing from it. Huge profit mar­gins aside, they have decided that I am the ideal man to man­age a pro­ject in an area I am led to believe is called East Lon­don. For those of you who aren’t in the know, I will save you a trip to Google maps and point out that this is just east of The City. I’d pre­vi­ously con­sidered any­thing the other side of Bish­opsgate as some sort of post-apocolyptic hin­ter­land — I actu­ally wasn’t too far off the mark.

It appears the nat­ives of the area are made up entirely of build­ers, per­haps it is some sort of post-soviet com­mune? It also appears that they don’t have kit­chens and use places called ‘the caff’ as their only source of food. Being stuck in the place for sev­eral days I was forced to visit ‘the caff’. Luck­ily for me I had my boss with me, someone who shall hence­forth be known as CWB (cock­ney wide boy). CWB decided on enter­ing the ‘caff’ that he should do the talk­ing, it was prob­ably a fair assess­ment as the place had ground to a halt upon our entry. CWB was wear­ing a chalk stripe suit and doing his best impres­sion of one of those nasty Essex boy futures traders. I’m glad that even the very poor could see this was sar­torial bad form, he was wear­ing a belt FFS! I, on the other hand was resplen­dent in brown Chelsea boots, mole­skins, a pink sweater and battered Barbour.

While I waited to be seated, CWB bowled straight to the counter and ordered ‘break­fast 1.’ I felt like going off-piste and order­ing a la carte but thought it best to fol­low suit and go for the prix fixe. I actu­ally wanted poached and not fried eggs but lost my nerve.

On sit­ting down I thought I would strike up a top­ical con­ver­sa­tion with CWB so told him: ‘I’ll smell like Ian fuck­ing Beale by the time I leave here’. It appears this wasn’t a good move. There was, once more, the sound of cut­lery scrap­ing to a halt on espe­cially toughened plates. CWB gave me a look which said: ‘look at your Black­berry and don’t open your mouth again until we leave’. Our food arrived in record time and yes, everything was actu­ally swim­ming in grease. CWB pro­ceeded to cover everything in a red tomato sauce that looked neither sun dried nor organic. The meal itself was actu­ally very good, it was very fatty but I ima­gine the loc­als need all the stodge they can get in order to insu­late against the cruel estu­ary wind when roof­ing or sleep­ing rough, I tried to ima­gine I was soon head­ing for a day of car­ry­ing a hod up a ladder.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the thick tar like sub­stance that resided in the mug placed in front of me. How­ever, on glan­cing at the other table I quickly under­stood that you have to pour as much sugar as it takes to stand your spoon up straight. I thought this very cos­mo­pol­itan, a bit like Lebanese coffee.

My final faux pas of the meal was at the end; on attract­ing the atten­tion of one of the wait­ing staff I asked for the bill, I thought it would do my career no harm if I bought the boss brekkie. It was dur­ing the res­ult­ing hil­ar­ity that CWB hussled me out and on to the mean, mean streets.

Over­all I enjoyed my trip to the ‘caff’. Although I dropped the occa­sional cul­tural clanger I thought this to be expec­ted when going eth­nic, I had the same issue when try­ing to eat with my left hand in the middle east. Aesthetically the place was run down but I sus­pect this was on pur­pose, it must have cost them a for­tune to get a designer to hit that soviet-sheet-steal-workers-canteen look. I won­der how long before we see these places pop­ping up all over London?

Over­all: 3/4. Meal £10 without wine or service.