Fusion, smell-scapes and eat.st crew’s cross-pollination experiments

We’ve seen some interesting fusion lately on the curb, one of the most unusual being the “Ruebendilla” from VadaszMasaDeli at Hackney Homemade. There’s Nick at the griddle, throwing on his hand-pressed corn tortillas which he fills with salt beef, sauerkraut and Swiss cheese. It gets folded together and served with home-pickled pickles. The unmistakable waft of the maiz that has many a gringo, unaccustomed to such pungency, recoiling, is part of the magic. In our increasingly odorless cities which increasingly all smell the same, it’s nice to be able to pick out a sense of place – of somewhereness – in the air….even if that somewhere is a contortion. It breaks up the typical, the expected, the resolved and keeps you keen.

This is what we love.

And we love that Kimchi Cult are now fusing Korean with Mexican with their bulgogi steak or pulled pork tortas. Kimchi and cheese and bulgogi and pickles and guacamole in one hot, griddled package – really? Oh yeah, and every slathery, dripping morsel of it tells a story.

photo courtesy of jonnyfromtheblock

Stories + smells + eating + ideas = why I love food on the streets. When you order that sandwich or pizza or salad or wrap, you’re getting a window into the world of the person who’s handing that food over: where they’ve travelled, who they’ve mixed with, how they’ve spent their time, and it’s culminated in a connection between them and you & your lunch. These stalls, vans and carts may not be pinned to the ground; made still by brick and mortar, but the roots to other people, other worlds are right there, carried in to transform the pavement, albeit just for a few hours.

The reason we started eat.st was to bring great minds together through the food they make and give a name to this community. If you’re the kind of person who is happy to take off and fetch up wherever the hungry/greedy may need you, then you’re bound to have a bit of imagination and funk in your right thigh. So it’s no wonder that when pitched up next to each other that ideas will fly and flavours will mingle. Chief instigator, with his hallowed Holy Fuck sauce, is The Rib Man. Due to its cunning ability to reach into many food-stuffs we have seen this naga-lousy number rear its wicked little head among other species of street food:

Along the shaft of Big Apple’s hot dogs…bleeding through the meat of Egg Bosses Scotch Eggs…firing up beef jerky…seizing hold of butter…and now, a whole new prospect: The Holy Fuck rib meat Homeslice pizza. GRrrrrr, read it and weep, y’all. Or come to King’s Cross next Thursday 5th for its debut and eat it and weep.

But it doesn’t stop there because we have Jez and his grass-fed van, dispensing balls and ideas galore. He is working on some Holy Fuck meatballs (obvs), but is also straying into other cell structures – looking to lay his balls down on Homeslice’s ever-yielding dough…darting over to Luardos hatch for some meatball-burrito cross-pollination…even knocking on the closed-for-business counter of Choc Star (RIP) for chocolate balls.

Where will this strain head next? Who else will be linking up? London’s unsuspecting aura awaits being taken over by the new smells. Keep your noses clean and your bellies ready, things are about to get a whole lot more twisted!

(And we haven’t even talked about Tongue ‘n Cheek’s Heartbreaker burger. This will need a whole post of its own….)

eat.st is at King’s Boulevard, N1C every Wednesday – Friday, 11am-2.30pm and every Tuesday from April 17th: http://www.eat.st/kings-cross

 

Homeslice – what we’ve been waiting for.

Last week I took my maiden voyage in what I thought was called The Ginger Line. Everyone since then disagrees with me but I’m sallying on regardless. Track-wise, ginger works for me – and I love the way it lifted me from Whitechapel hardness to an altogether more relaxed Brockley.

We were there on the invitation of the Homeslice Pizza boys – linked up with us most deftly by our own erstwhile pizza boy, Charlie Nelson, of Robin’s Artisan Pizza. Chaz may have chucked in the trowel, dough-wise, but it hasn’t stopped him from having his ear to the ground on the pizza scene.He had discovered them in Hackers a few weeks back and was taken by their home-made oven, producing really special pizzas.

After getting lost and finding ourselves surrounded by blocks of condo-style buildings – all strangely US-seeming – and with the surprisingly warm evening, I really started feeling like I was indeed a very long way from Whitechapel.

At last we entered the Homeslice zone – an industrial park reached through a great moaning metal gate – and there to greet us, along with our hosts, was this:

Courtesy, along with these great pics, of Louis Fernando/Tuck & Vine. Now I knew that the holiday had really started. Always up for some proper tequila, I got stuck in immediately. MMmmm – the sweet, sweet taste of a reposado slinking over all the London-ness and enveiling it in softness.

David, George and Rowan were all ready to hit us with some Homeslice action. There was Rowan, rolling out the dough backstage, David immediately furnishing us with Cannonball beer and George looking debonnair by the oven, all Phileas Fogg moustache and formidable stance.

Ahh, the oven.

It is a hand-moulded mound of tactile beauty. I stood over it, rubbing that warm, clay Buddha belly with anticipation. Inside, a fire roared…

Outside the excitement grew. More beers, more tequilas, a group of twelve or so pizza fans awaiting for the marathon that was about to start…the table stood by, ready:

And soon enough, out of that oven came a succession of some of the best pizzas I’ve had in London.

We ate and ate and ate. Waves of hot, be-jewelled discs of delight hitting the table. Hands reaching in, decimating each arrival…

Margarita; pizza fresca; pizza with chorizo; pizza with lamb, pine nuts and sultanas; with creamed leeks and prosciutto; zucchini, mushroom & lemon – and more, many more. I gave up after about round seven, knocked out.

Maybe it was the warm evening, the newness of Brockley, the allure of the encased flames or the great people. Or it could have been the tequila. But that pizza, made so well and with such thought by those Kiwi lads, was out of the ordinary and I can’t wait to have them join our gang. Watch this space!

All photos by Louis Fernando of Tuck & Vine