I believe in the social benefits of taxation. It’s how those of us who are lucky enough to find jobs can still hold up our heads in a Canada that is being split increasingly cynically into the haves and the have-nots by the Harper government’s divisive policies. Taxation is also responsible for a delicious Irish whiskey I tasted this week. It’s called Writers Tears (the link with the far right’s disdain for the liberal arts is another curious coincidence) and it will be launched at the LCBO on March 3^rd, so dip your quills into your bottle of emerald-coloured ink and scratch a shamrock onto that particular square of your calendar. There was a time in the 19^th century when Irish malt whiskey ruled the world, accounting for 90 percent of the whiskey or whisky exported from the British Isles. The Westminster government noticed and decided to tax Irish malt whiskey. The response of the Irish distillers was to add lots of unmalted barley into the mash that would end up in their pot stills, to be distilled three times in the labour-intensive way that distinguishes Irish from almost every Scotch.

In 1831, a much more efficient kind of still (the Coffey or patent still) was invented by an Irish excise man called Aeneas Coffey. It produced cleaner, lighter, more insipid spirits and these grain spirits were welcomed by the Scots as a way of lightening single malt Scotch into blended Scotch. There was an outcry in Ireland both from the malt whiskey aficionados and those who enjoyed the recent whiskeys made from malt and unmalted barley. For the rest of the century, the major distillers refused to use the Coffey spirits, remaining loyal to the whiskeys now known as Pure Pot Still. But the world moved on. Especially the world of export commerce. Accountants and auditors had no time for character and loyalty. Gradually Coffey-still whiskeys began to encroach into the old-school Irish spirits. The poets – and Ireland is nothing if not a land of poets – called out in favour of the old ways, but the sons of Fomor prevailed. Blended whiskeys and malt whiskeys supplanted all but a very few examples of the Pure Pot Still style. (I had better add here that I love almost all Irish whiskey and have no personal objection to this lush and infinitely variable blending, except when wearing the tragedian’s mask required for this particular story).

Anyway, the point is that right now we have a lovely opportunity to taste an Irish whiskey that is free of those leavening grain spirits. Writers Tears is a rich and very unusual blend of Pure Pot Still whiskey and pure Irish single malt whiskey from the same company that makes a premixed Irish Coffee beverage and a single malt Irish whiskey called the Irishman, though you won’t find that name on this bottle. Go to the web site however, and you’ll see a picture of Bernard Walsh, who founded and owns the company with his wife, Rosemary. Walsh has access to some fabulous spirits produced by Irish distillers which he purchases and vats into his own blends. Irishman 70, Walsh’s creation from a few years back, was a similar spirit to Writers Tears, that is to say a blend of Pure Pot Still and malt whiskey but with a considerably higher proportion (70 percent) of malt.

            The first thing you notice about Writers Tears is the lovely round body and full rich flavour. Not only is this uncut by cleaner, lighter spirits, it is also allowed to go into the bottle without being chill-filtered. So if it sometimes shows a haze under cool conditions, it has lost none of its original nuances. The aroma reminds me of honey and marmalade streaking the fruity barley. There’s a hint of citrus in the flavour too and an initial flourish of spicy, malty sweetness that quickly leaves the stage to drier, firmer characters. The honey-marmalade comes back as a pianissimo echo of the aroma to provide the final moments of a decently long finish.

            It’s lovely stuff, in other words, and a must-have bottle for anyone who collects Irish whiskeys. Look for it in the Vintages March 3^rd release (VINTAGES 271106, 700 mL, $47.95).

The Challenge was created in 2004 as part of The Renaissance Project, brainchild of Felice Sabatino of Via Allegro Ristorante, to celebrate and encourage excellence in our wine service industry. It was a huge success and, as the competition grew, Brock University’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute was appointed as the organizing, presenting and auditing body in 2005. It is now the most unique and largest wine tasting competition in the world, with the largest prize purse of its kind in the world – upwards of $100,000 including cash, trips, Spiegelau stemware and scholarships.

In the Challenge’s early days, Toronto Life was a media sponsor, an association that has since been dissolved but which made me proud when I was still involved with the magazine. I particularly liked the fact that the competition was open to anyone, professional and amateur, and that no entry fee was required. That is still the case. The event is operated by volunteers and all awards and competition expenses (venue, food, wines, etc.) are provided courtesy of the sponsors. In a healthy spirit of competition, neither The Renaissance Project nor CCOVI keeps or publishes any individual scores. Only the names of the winners and runner-ups for each of the categories are announced.

            It’s a very tough competition – as it should be with so much at stake. All the wines and spirits are presented ‘double blind’ (purchased and at the competition, pre-poured out of sight by “bonded” representatives from CCOVI at Brock University) the “challenge” is to correctly identify the grape varietal, country, region of origin and vintage from a diverse range of world wines. The professionals try to identify seven wines while the amateurs attempt to identify three wines. There are two supplementary rounds where (1) three VQA wines are presented double blind and (2) three spirits are presented double blind.

            You can find out much more and see a list of the noble sponsors who make all this possible at the Challenge’s website, http://winetastingchallenge.com/.

Peter Boyd has something to sing about tonight

            And so to business:

1^st Prize, professional: Peter Boyd, Sommelier at Scaramouche and an Instructor with the International Sommelier Guild, songwriter and preternaturally gifted blues musician.

2^nd Prize, professional: Jonathan Salem-Wiseman, Professor at the Humber School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, winner of 1^st Prize, amateur in 2010.

3^rd Prize, professional: Eugene Mlynczyk, Key Account Manager, Sales at Vincor Canada.

1^st Prize, amateur: Anthea deSouza

2^nd Prize, amateur: Jordan Mills

3^rd Prize, amateur: Monika Janek

Spirit Champion: Mark Coster, familiar to all as a contributing writer at Good Food Revolution.

CCOVI VQA Challenge Champion: Peter Bodnar Rod, Director of sales and marketing at 13^th Street Winery and the Director Online education, Wine Industry Liaison at the International Sommelier Guild. He was also the first Grand Award winner of the Challenge, back in 2004.

            Huge congratulations to them all!

Chef Rob Rossi and Front-of-house Ryan Sarfeld, co-owners of Bestellen

We had a fascinating preview of Rob Rossi’s new restaurant, Bestellen, last night when he and co-owner Ryan Sarfeld hosted a VISA Infinite dinner on the premises. It should open in early February but there have been some delays getting licenses from the City (Unheard-of! How astonishing!). Based on last night’s experience, I think Rossi is on to a sure thing for his first shot at chef-patron. The room is very long and narrow with a bar halfway down it and a big open kitchen at the rear. The décor is rustic but not rude with fine old barn boards on the ceiling and an arresting mural of animal parts on one of the walls. Meat will feature strongly on Bestellen’s menu (there’s a great big meat locker with a window for watching the beef dry ageing) and it was front and centre last night.

            Robert Rossi, in case you didn’t know, was one of the three finalists in last year’s Top Chef Canada television show. He looks too young but has actually been in the business for a decade, first at Café Brussel on the Danforth, then Canoe for a couple of years, then Habitat, when Scott Woods was chef there and amazing the city with his molecular cooking. In 2009, Rob went west to be sous chef at The Chef’s Table in Calgary, then came back to Toronto to take over as Executive Chef of the four Mercatto restaurants. I thought he did a great job there – the food was always fresh, original, delicious and far more accomplished than it needed to be.

            I had sort of assumed Bestellen might propose yet another domestic Italian menu, but no – it’s actually far more original. Last night Rossi showed he has an eye for the simple, rich, delicious dishes of pre-nouvelle French cooking. He also flaunted the charcuterie he has been working on since last summer, ably assisted by Grant Van Gameren, lately of Black Hoof. It’s all pork, dry-aged in house and I was struck by how moist and fresh it all tasted. We had a noce – a fairly coarse, fermented salami studded with crumbled walnuts that turn rather meaty when trapped inside a sausage for months (as who would not?). A fermented salami tastes tangier and more salami-like than your average charc. There was lonza (pork loin cured like prosciutto), a yummy chorizo, ruby-coloured copa and several others served with slices of fried house bread – basically a batard loaf made on the premises. As condiments he offered pickled ramps. Rossi goes fly fishing on the Grand River and when he has caught his limit he spends the rest of the day picking wild ramps from a large and double-secret patch.  

The wall of meat at Bestellen

There were other canapés – little one-bite brochettes of duck hearts speared with caramelized cippolini onion and smoked bacon cured with maple syrup and bourbon. The kitchen got the hearts just right – medium-rare rather than overcooked and grainy or undercooked and sticky. A simple tartare of albacore tuna, preserved lemon, green apple and basil served in a spoon was the best mjatch for our aperitif of very brut Champagne.

The first course dropped us into the deep end in terms of saturated fat. No fresh little salad to get us going. No. We had a cube of Ontario pork belly cooked sous-vide in duck fat and then deep-fried. The outside was delightfully crisp, the inside quiveringly unctuous. So delicious! Paired with some Brussels sprout petals, a little savoury chestnut purée and a sherry-caramel gastrique. A rich beginning, to be sure. The wine chosen for it, captivatingly introduced by my co MC, Jamie Drummond, was Pyramid Valley Vineyards Riverbrook Riesling 2008 from New Zealand, rich but clean, aglow with lime, petrol and honey aromas. Gorgeous on its own, it was a little put out by the gastrique, showing a sudden moment of bitterness. Not what one expects from a well-brought-up kiwivino.

Lobster beignet with Sauce Americaine; butter-poached lobster with salsify

The second course was an example of Rossi’s interest in retro sophistication – butter-poached lobster, courteously lifted out of its shell for us, the flesh impeccably tender. Beside it was a little lobster beignet that used up the knuckle meat from the creatures, stirred into a batter and quickly fried. There was salsify – as batons and as a purée. I love salsify – the pale but interesting, juicy but subtle love-child of an artichoke and an asparagus. But it’s not a vegetable you see much any more. The sauce was a classic Americaine made with the crushed lobster shells, vegetable mirepoix, tomato purée, wine and brandy, cayenne… One mopped it all up with the beignet. (I used to think Lobster à l’Americaine might conceivably be an American dish. Smack! comes the hand of Prosper Montagné and the Larousse Gastronomique. It was invented in Paris by Chef Pierre Fraisse of Peter’s Restaurant during the period of the Second Empire. He had to improvise a version of Lobster Provencale for some customers who were in a hurry and came up with what he called Homard a l’Americaine. Were the customers American tourists? Possibly. Fraisse himself had worked in Chicago for a while and according to Larousse, the chef was “still under the influence of his American sojourn.”) Either way, it was a smashing dish and the lobster itself was perfectly paired with Littoral Wines Charles Heintz Sonoma Chardonnay 2009. The wine and the sauce, however, wasn’t such a happy union.

Roast beef rib and marrowbones - not exactly short commons

On to the main event – roasted rib of 40-day dry-aged Wellington County beef, cooked on the bone sous-vide then finished in the oven. It came to the table on a platter for two to share, garnished with split marrowbones. Side dishes were button mushrooms with lemon beurre maître d’ and pommes aligot. Have you forgotten Pommes Aligot? It’s a dish from the Massif Central and the Pyrenees, basically mashed potato mixed with far too much butter and a little garlic, into which grated Appenzeller cheese is folded until it develops an almost elastic consistency, like a semi-solid fondue. The food of champions. It was an amazingly successful course and the wine match was absolutely first class – a big Californian Cab that had much more Bordeaux-style elegance than usual: Stonestreet Wines Monument Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon, Sonoma Valley 2007.

Following on, for those who might still be hungry, we moved to a trio of Canadian cheeses introduced by Angela Marsillio from the Dairy Farmers of Canada. Then dessert – a chomeur pudding. In French Canada, a chomeur is a poor man, a person on welfare, and this classic dish is a baked maple pudding, devised at a time when maple syrup was cheaper than sugar. Rossi’s version starts by coating the inside of a small Mason jar with cream and reduced maple syrup then filling the jar with layers of raw cakey-pancake batter and maple syrup. Bake it and serve it in the jar with a teaspoon and some crème fraîche – just an edge of lactic acidity to pretend to cut the sweetness… heaven in a jam jar, if entirely unrelated to the chosen wine, a stunning, heavy-duty Gewurztraminer from Alsace, Domaine Ostertag Selection des Grains Nobles 2007.

            I liked what I saw of Bestellen and I foresee a bright future for the place. It’s located at 972 College Street (close to Rusholme). Phone 647 341 6769. Check out the site at www.bestellen.ca.

There you go… That’s the mandate of the Ontario Hostelry Institute, an organisation that does a great deal of good for anyone who likes to eat out in this province – or stay in a hotel, or shop for local, artisanal products, or read about food and wine. The OHI provides scholarships and bursaries to talented young people who might not otherwise be able to afford professional training, and we all benefit from that. The OHI does this, in part, through its gala – a most convivial black tie party held every spring at the Four Seasons that is also an opportunity to celebrate the careers of industry leaders by giving out gold awards.

Last week, past honorees gathered just after dawn to discuss who should be honoured in 2012. The meeting was convened (and governed with his usual mixture of tact and firmness) by the OHI’s chair and president, Charles Grieco. He has generously allowed me to share the news of the winners in each category.

Chef: Stephen Treadwell, Stephen Treadwell Farm-to-Table Cuisine
Hotelier: Anthony (Tony) Cohen, Global Edge Investments

Independent Restaurateur: Frédéric Geisweiller, Le Sélect Bistro

Educator, Dr. Julia Christensen Hughes, Dean, College of Management & Economics, University of Guelph

Media/Publishing, Jody Dunn, Editor and Marketing Manager of Food & Drink magazine

Foodservice Chain Operator: Cora Tsouflidis, CORA

Supplier: Stephen J. Shamie, Hicks Morley

Artisanal supplier: Stephanie Purdy, Purdy’s Fisheries Limited

A star-studded list of people. And that’s not all. Mr. Grieco will also be presenting the Chairman’s OHI Gold Award to Anita Stewart M.C., LL.D.and the Chairman’s Lifetime Achievement Gold Award to Dean John Walker MBA of George Brown College. The following people have been newlt elected as Fellows of the Ontario Hostelry Institute: Jamie Drummond – Good Food Revolution; Jeff Stewart MBA – Centre for Food and Wine – Niagara College; Melanie Coates – Fairmont Royal York; Connie McDonald – Royal Ontario Museum; Chef David Chrystian – Hotel Le Germain; Jill McCoey – Langdon Hall Country House Hotel & Spa;

Afrim Pristine – Cheese Boutique; Lori Stahlbrand – Local Food Plus; Peter Bodnar Rod – 13 Street Winery; Gary Hallam M.Sc. – Conestoga College.

Congratulations to all. The gala dinner will be held on March 22 this year (please see below). It’s going to be a smashing beano with Anne Yarymowich, executive chef of Frank, and Michael Bonacini, executive chef of Oliver Bonacini, serving as the Honorary Dinner Chairs.

Smith's daily flatbread

We wanted dinner somewhere new; I picked up a two-week-old copy of the Star and found a gushing review of a restaurant called Smith that opened last fall on Church Street… Kismet. I reached for the phone.

If Fate governed our choice, perhaps it also determined the tenor of the experience. Everything about our evening seemed a tiny bit out of sync. It may have been our fault, booking at an hour that was so unfashionably early for that hard-partying part of town. Smith is in an old three-storey building but there was no one to be seen when we pushed open the door except the manager, sitting at a table looking at the evening’s reservations. The room looked pleasant – a fireplace, old mirrors, a Persian rug. But we only caught a glimpse before we were whisked upstairs to an equally empty but distinctly more dowdy room. We must have been judged and found wanting – too early, too old, too square or too straight… Who can say?

But this was to be our home for the next two hours so we might as well make the most of it. We looked around. Have we not, by now, seen more than enough Edison bulbs to light us (ever so dimly) to the grave? Commute Home’s shabby-chic design for Smith uses them liberally, along with a chandelier or two, lots of interesting, edgy artifacts on the black walls and plenty of exposed, distressed industrial moments. Of course the crockery and cutlery was mismatched vintage stuff. Left to ourselves, we crept up a narrow staircase to check out the third floor and found a bar and also a barre, cutely mounted against a wall of mirrors with dozens of pink ballet shoes hanging from the ceiling. On Saturday nights, apparently, the top two storeys become a wild and crazy happening.

Tonight was anything but. Smith’s short menu is printed on a huge, folded sheet of newsprint so even I could read it without my specs. The wine list is reasonable and well balanced; there are house cocktails, too, of course.

We started with the “olive plate.” Someone in the kitchen must have heard that Oliver Bonacini restaurants serve their olives warm: these ones were piping – not a plate but a bowl of sun-dried Moroccan olives, nuked (presumably) until they were too hot to put into one’s mouth.

The daily flatbread sounded yummy and indeed the toppings were excellent – tender duck confit, tangy salsa verde, arugula, pea shoots, dabs of creamy goat cheese, slices of pickled beet that threatened to take over the whole dish but then surrendered the field to a strewing of hazelnuts. It would have been lovely except the flatbread let down the side. It was stodgy and cold like yesterday’s paratha. Chef Taylor Quinn is a Jamie Kennedy alumnus and ought to know that flatbread needs to be grilled or toasted as it was on every Kennedy menu for 20 years.

The pearl barley "risotto"

We ordered the risotto which turned out not to be rice but pearl barley tossed with diced carrots, lots of cremini mushrooms, fennel and slices of chioggia beet, all surrounded by a halo of golden beet purée around the bowl. On top lay a feta croquette, lightly breaded and fried. As dishes go it was fine – tasty, wholesome, just short on finesse.

My main course was miso-glazed sable fish, a dish created in the 1990s and so often copied it became a cliché, here presented without a trace of retro irony. The fish itself was lovely, lightly crusted with red miso, parting into buttery petals at the touch of a fork, but I wasn’t so dotty about the accompaniments. Bok choy was as bland as crunchy water; shemiji mushrooms contributed nothing but slipperiness; a superfluity of mushroom-ginger broth was the weakest liquid imaginable. I thought my taste buds had malfunctioned but no, I could taste the bitter phenolics of a still-hot Moroccan olive.

Sable fish with miso glaze

Braised Moroccan chicken was much more successful – a huge portion of tender chicken thighs and breast, nicely spiced and set over a rowdy jumble of couscous (again misidentified as rice – the menu calls it “pilaf”), more mushrooms, olives, tomato, preserved lemon, onion and what I think must have been dates. Hearty and lots of fun.

We finished with a Riesling-poached pear that was becomingly fresh and aromatic, sharing the light poaching syrup with a couple of apricots, a star anise pod, a scutum of cinnamon and a sprig of fresh mint. On top was a scoop of gorgeous lavender mascarpone ice cream.

It was not yet nine as we left the establishment. By now the main floor was packed with merry men tucking in to chef’s fare, a most convivial scene.

Smith is open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday and serves brunch on Saturday and Sunday. 553 Church Street (at Gloucester Street), 416 926 2501. Check it out at smithrestaurant.com.  

Our Anita

I am delighted to report that my friend Anita Stewart was awarded the Order of Canada on New Year’s Day, honoured “for her contributions as a journalist, author and culinary activist and for her promotion of the food industry in Canada.” Anita is an inspiration to our broad industry, one of very few people who understands the big picture of Canadian food and also its smallest local nuances. She is the founder of Food Day (http://foodday.ca), broadcasts regularly on CBC Radio (cbc.ca/freshair) and for nearly three decades has chronicled the food life of Canada. As an author she has published 14 books, including Anita Stewart’s CANADA: The Food, The Recipes, The Stories, that recently hit the Globe and Mail’s Bestseller list. She is on the Advisory Council for the Governor General’s Award in Celebration of the Nation’s Table and is an honourary lifetime member of the Canadian Culinary Federation of Chefs and Cooks (CCFCC). I’m also very happy that she is one of the Toronto panel of judges for Gold Medal Plates.

Once upon a time she and Jamie Kennedy (also an OC) and I planned to create a tv show. We wanted to call it Free Radicals and proposed that the three of us should criss-cross Canada with Anita leading us to fabulous indigenous foods, Jamie cooking them and me commenting about the process. I thought it was a great idea but the networks found the whole thing too cerebral. No competitive back-biting or kitchen shenanigans, no manufactured melodrama or gratuitous cussing… Plus, it must be said, our travel budget would have been astronomical. Still, I think the show would have worked. Maybe next time.

The Order of Canada has a motto that suits Anita rather well: DESIDERANTES MELIOREM PATRIAM… “They desire a better country.” It is our good fortune as Canadians and food lovers that Anita has always been prepared to act on that desire, fearlessly in person and so elegantly in prose.

One of the things that has given me most pleasure in the last few years is to watch the friendship burgeon between my daughter and my mother. Now that Mae is living in London for most of the year, growing her career as a stand-up comic, they have been spending lots of time together. I never taught Mae to cook (mea culpa, mea gulpa culpa) in the way that my mother (a genius in the kitchen) taught me to cook. Now my mum is doing the honours. In fact, they are considering writing a cookbook together and I am sure it will be vivid and funny and wise and full of invaluable insight.

            One of the dishes my mother has taught my daughter in the last year is Toad in the Hole. Everyone knows, I hope, that this is an English treat consisting (in its most usual incarnation) of sausages smothered in batter pudding (a.k.a. Yorkshire pudding) then baked. The end of the sausage tends to poke out from the pudding like a toad looking out of a hole. The whole affair is delicious with hot English mustard.

            I was thinking about toad in the hole last week when I was in Greece and busy installing a new woodstove chimney through our three-foot-thick stone walls. The guy doing most of the work was Steve O’Connor, an Englishman who has lived in the next village but one for a good 20 years. We were swapping renovation stories while we worked and talking about the things we had found in our very old houses – dowry papers and other legal documents sealed for safe-keeping in an old daub-and-wattle bedroom wall; bits of a stone mortar; bottles of veterinary embrocation; an English gold sovereign that had slipped between floorboards a hundred years ago.

            Steve had the strangest story. His old house, like mine, had a stone pezouli running along the inside wall of the kitchen – like a support wall about three feet high and two feet deep – useful for sitting on or using as a big shelf. I kept mine; he decided he’d rather have the extra floor space and started to demolish his, busting off the plaster and old whitewash then digging out the stones and rubble from which the wall was made. To his surprise, the pezouli was hollow and the inside was rank and damp where the roots of an olive tree had writhed their way in from the garden outside and then rotted. He had almost finished the job when he noticed something in the dim light of the kitchen – something shiny and black that moved amidst the rubble. It was a monstrous toad. Sometime long ago it must have squeezed in from the outside, following the olive root. It couldn’t get out and so it lived in the darkness inside the wall, blind and imprisoned, growing ever fatter on whatever moisture it could suck from the rotting tree roots, eating whatever creatures found their way into that fetid space.

            “It was as big as a half-deflated soccer ball,” said Steve. “Monstrous. I got a shovel under it and carried it outside under the trees. It was heavy and it wobbled. Then I went back in and began digging down, sealing the wall.”

            And now I can’t get the image of the toad out of my mind. Toad in the hole. It has quite put me off my tea.

Cold days in the Ionian

New Year’s Eve, and there are yellow flowers in the thick wet grass of my garden in Corfu, and snow on the mountains of Albania. The island is extraordinarily quiet this season – as I discovered last night. My koubaros Philip, who owns the bar in our village, and I went out for dinner at nine o’clock, intending to eat whitebait and mussels at The Pumphouse, a venerable and favourite haunt in the town of Akharavi, down on the coast. Or we would go to another place, five miles westward in Karoussades, a grill room where they make the best rolo on the island. Rolo is pork belly stuffed with onion, garlic, masses of herbs, salt, sweet paprika and sometimes feta cheese. You roll it up, bind it with wire and spit-roast it slowly over a charcoal grill. I hadn’t eaten anything but a bowl of soup all day and was thoroughly looking forward to it.

            Well, The Pumphouse was closed, much to Philip’s surprise – and mine, since this was the Friday night before New Year’s, at the height of the holiday season. Nothing daunted, we pushed on for Karoussades and the famous rolo. Zounds! That place was closed, too.

            “Okay,” said Philip. “We can go to a really interesting place back in Roda where they always cook traditional but unusual dishes.” Sounded good and we drove on into the increasing rain, passing an occasional car. Philip turned off the main road into Roda and then started to swear under his breath. The empty restaurant’s windows were dark, the chairs stacked inside.

            “You know, we could go back to my house and I’ll cook spaghetti,” suggested Philip, but we were both looking forward to the conviviality of a busy restaurant. He suggested a more casual grill room back in Akharavi that was always open. It too was closed. By now we were laughing and also sighing. It’s the economy here in Greece that is to blame, keeping people at home, even on festive nights like this one. We ended up at another town called Kassiopi, miles to the east, where one of Philip’s friends has a good, honest taverna. It too was locked and silent. Indeed, the only place open on the entire northern coast was a take-out, neon-lit burger bar by the bus stop in Kassiopi and the only customers were adolescent youths who would presumably rather be anywhere on earth than at home with their parents at half past ten at night.

            We sat down at one of the two or three tables. Five minutes later, we stood up and placed our own order at the counter – souvlaki and a salad, twice, and a half-bottle of retsina to share. The mood of frugality is contagious. The souvlaki were surprisingly good and the salad was fresh and crisp, a jumble of cucumber, tomato, olives and feta. We were soon putting the world to rights. Philip’s view of the current state of this country is that anything would be better than years of fiscal oppression. He has always described himself as an anarchist, an advocate of chaos and revolution as catalysts for change and rebirth. Then the conversation turned to a debate about the merits of pressing green, unripe olives for oil (my position) rather than ripe black ones (his). Despite the bitter recession, it is only the old who still farm olives seriously on this island, the price of oil is at rock bottom. The young have been cutting down the trees and selling the wood. Lorryloads of it leave on the ferry for Italy every day.

            “The trees will grow again,” said Philip. Will the economy?

Lodovico - bravissimo

This is Lodovico, a most self-possessed and well-behaved infant. He and I sat across from each other for Christmas lunch at the Savoy and I can only say that in terms of la gourmandise, he left me in the dust. The empty dish before him was his second bowl of polenta. Before that he had enjoyed some of Gordon Ramsay’s “pumpkin soup” (spread across a side-plate to cool by his father, who is a chef and owns a super restaurant in the Abruzzo). Lodovico and I were both guests at a wonderful party for 27 hosted by very dear friends of my mother in a private salon called the D’Oyly Carte room, just on the left of the American Bar. It is an annex of the Savoy Grill downstairs, a restaurant now in G Ramsay’s portfolio, and was the perfect location for the festive gathering. Somehow the kitch art-deco horror vacui of the newly redecorated Savoy has not reached this charming chamber, which was once a most discreet little bar where the theatre producer Michael Codron used to host famous lunches when I was a nipper. I was never privy to those glamorous occasions but my mother remembers them well.

I had been looking forward to the Ramsay version of the Christmas feast and much of it was lovely – the turkey itself, to be sure, and the awesome roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts with bacon – and the pigs in blankets (chipolatas wrapped in bacon and roasted) once they had been sent back to the oven to achieve a crisping and a tan. But the great man nodded where the Christmas pudding was concerned – pale, bland mounds, gummy with flour, that tasted as though they had been rustled up that morning, not last year, and came with a sort of brandy butter aïoli that was a very far cry from the echt hard sauce which was always my brother’s speciality. We began with a studied collation of smoked fish – salmon, mackerel and sturgeon with a horseradish mousse, buckwheat blinis and devilled quail’s eggs. My mother can’t eat oysters so she asked the waiter to make sure there were none on the plate. Alas, he misunderstood and set down six perfect Colchester beauties before her instead of the fish. As soon as he was gone we swapped our plates so everyone ended up happy. Very happy, to be sure, for the company and the conversation was stellar and the wines magnificent – Domaine Didier Morion Vent d’Anges 2008 Condrieu with the fish and Hudelot Noellat Chambolle Musigny 2004 with the bird.

For me, it was a flying visit to Lunnun Tarn but there were other culinary highlights. The city looked pristine, though it seemed oddly quiet on my late-night perambulations, walking through the echoing labyrinth of Chelsea streets I grew up in, now empty and guarded and somewhat foreign, though marinated in my own nostalgia. England’s economic austerity can be felt. I hope it will prove to be the carfeully controlled deep breath before the glorious plunge into the Olympics this coming summer.

Meanwhile my mother roasted pheasants for our first supper (living in Canada, I crave game that has been properly hung in the feather) and then we turned the carcases into a spectacular soup. I found some dressed Essex crabs no bigger than the saucer of an espresso cup and ate far too many of them. There was a very memorable Vacherin at its unctuous Yuletide best – and my mum taught me her recipe for Welsh cakes. Dear friends of my youth, neglected this time around, I shall have you all over for tea when I come back in the spring and we shall see how well I have learned the technique.

And then it was Victoria Station at six o’clock in the morning, the hell of Gatwick and Easyjet to Athens and Olympic to Kerkyra… And here I am tonight in room 52 of the Cavalieri hotel in Corfu Town, the esplanade warm and dry under a new moon, the streets bright with Christmas lights and thronged with merry-makers – but more of that anon.

   The evening traffic was particularly heavy. We would crawl along for a hundred yards and then stop, while people with umbrellas and Christmas shopping swayed around the car, their faces distorted by the film of water on my window. But Santa Claus had no umbrella. He was standing on the corner outside Foyle’s bookshop, dishevelled and sagging, held up by two policemen. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead and he had lost his beard; one half of his face was smeared with mud. His head was lolling and his mouth was twisted into an idiotic grin.

   My breath fogged the window and I quickly wiped it away with my hand. Perhaps he thought I was waving, for he suddenly looked up and stared at me with exhausted eyes. The grin began to fade away. His arms were pinned too tightly in the policemen’s grip, but I saw his right hand stiffen towards the car and move from side to side.

   To this day I do not know what to make of that small gesture. It seemed to say don’t worry – pay no attention to all this. It might have been a dismissal, or a benediction.

   Then the traffic edged us on and I lost sight of him. It was a while before I realised that my father had seen him too.

   “Just a drunk in a red ulster,” he murmured as we turned onto Oxford Street.