Richard's Reviews

Prone, as I am, to flights of fancy, I thought I'd share my latest one with you.
It's July 1994 in London; ‘the recession’ is the name of a night-club in Wigan and Apple Mac make ‘word-processors’ for soccer-moms and dentists. I own a small factory which produces 35 different scents of joss stick; needless to say, I'm in the money. I have no family, a butt-load of (rich) friends, a big white house in Primrose Hill, and hair like Hugh Grant. Every day at 12.30 PM, after a hard day's work, I slip on my Reebok classics and squeek down the street to Manna; my favourite restaurant. I always dine alone at the same, beautifully dressed table by the window and the staff know me as “Bread-and-olives-upon-arrival-man” or “B&O” for short (a name I would repudiate if it weren't a symbol of familiarity).
Despite their constantly shifting menu, Kate (the waitress with glitter on her eyes and chop-sticks in her hair) knows just what I want; I don't even open the menu. She asks me if I'd like to try their new Sauvignon Blanc while she scribbles ‘bean chimichanga w/ blackened tomato sauce and avocado mango salsa’. I smile – the ‘Hello Kitty’ head on the end of her pencil does the nodding for me. As with the day before, the food is spot-on. The chimichanga battles in my mouth and mind with a North American high school cafeteria, but it's no contest; the cafeteria is battered by explosion after explosion of powerful, accurate taste missiles and is left waving a white hair net from behind a plastic tray. The blackened tomato sauce tastes like someone took all the tomatoes in the world, blitzed them and simmered them in a pan for a million years until all that remained was the most tomato-y tablespoon of anything that has ever existed ever. My portion is never pretentiously small nor disconcertingly large and as I finish my glass of wine I thank God for joss sticks.
In my parallel universe, Manna is already a veteran of the Primrose Hill foodie scene as it perpetually redefines what it is to… More