Offal

Readers, I had a fascinating meat weekend. On Friday night I went to St John for some getting in touch with my inner carnivore. It's all white, set in a former smokehouse, and the space certianly wasn't made for a restaurant, creating all sorts of funny angles as the dining room wraps around the kitchen. Some have called it the best restaurant in the world. It was pretty great -- bright, airy, classy, and, well, adventurous. The theme of the place is "Nose-to-tail Eating" and we set out to order things we hadn't ever tried. Our selections included marrow, chitterlings (intestine), salt pollock, and kid. The kid came with this green sauce that knocked my socks off -- parsley, mint, anchovy, and caper, and probably some other secrets. The chitterlings were layer of intestine upon layer of instestine, but somehow they had the consistency of yummy meat and some yummy flavor. The best quote of the night was from the friend I ate with when he pointed out that "Halloween is a coming out party for diabetics". We laughed at that then scraped marrow out of a piece of veal bone and spread it on toast.

The next day I went to the Saatchi Gallery in the London County Hall, a turn-of-the-century massive celebrating local government. The setting was pretty dramatic, but so were the preserved, sliced-up cows and pigs and sheeps and sharks decorating the entryway and the exhibition rooms. I got to see the other night's offal close up. The gallery was cool for reasons that don't fit with the pig-part theme of this post, too: an artist whose schtick is painting places he's never seen or seen pictures of, like the queen's bedroom; an enormous pillar of individaully-cast, hand-painted resin mice; and a room filled waist-high wall-to-wall with motor oil, wich reflected like a mirror and disoriented as you walked out the jetty into the middle of it.