Aug 11

Pickle Me This: Why No Good Gumbo In London?

If soup is the best comfort food, gumbo might be the ultimate comfort food. Which makes it sad that I have never been able to find good gumbo in London.

In my experience London gumbo is always too cold, or too spicy, or too thick (or as often too hot, too bland, or too thin). And also, to steal an old Groucho Marx joke, always such small portions!

This should not be surprising in a city that is largely not familiar with Creole or Cajun food. When Londoners hear “New Orleans” or “southern US”, they tend to think of fried chicken or barbecue.

Still, I have had one or two London gumbos that were not too bad – for example, one at Islington’s Plaquemine Lock the other week. And this week, I decided to try another at Fat Bear.

This central London restaurant describes itself as “widely considered one of the best American restaurants in London for Cajun, Creole, Southern and Soul Food”. This may be true – but, for the reasons mentioned above, this is not actually saying much.

I chose Fat Bear’s vegetarian gumbo (see image) as, for various reasons, I couldn’t eat meat that day. I was very aware, however, that this put me of risk of a bad meal. I have never found (or made) a good vegetarian gumbo – though I am aware of Lenten gumbo z’herbes, the most legendary version of which was made by late Dooky Chase owner and chef Leah Chase.

Her version has nine types of greens in it – I have read elsewhere that gumbo z’herbes must include as many greens as possible as every type represents a new friend you will add in the year to come (and an odd number of them, for luck). Despite all this, Chase’s dish also isn’t vegetarian – perhaps that, rather than all the greens, is the secret of its success?

The Fat Bear vegetarian gumbo was tasty with good helpings of okra and greens. But a large amount of sweetcorn made it too sugary and, combined with the peppers from the “trinity”, altogether too south-western in feel. Peas and parsley were perhaps allowable English summer touches, but lost it plenty of authenticity points.

White rice came on top of the gumbo, rather than underneath it. And yes, the portion was too small.

What was very New Orleans was the setting. Climbing up a flight of stairs in a side alley, I entered into a clean, smart dining room with an impressive array of bottles behind the bar. Service was immaculate.

And, in case you’re wondering about my title, I was blown away by an excellent side order of fried pickled peppers. These may not have been that authentic either, but their combination of sweet and hot with crisp tempura batter was delicious. And maybe that’s what matters most.

Aug 4

Acadia: Where Cajuns Came From

Image: Government of Prince Edward Island

I haven’t written much about Cajuns on this blog. This is not down to any lack of interest or respect. Instead it is because, despite what some people might think, being Cajun is not primarily about New Orleans, though there is plenty of Cajun culture in the city. In London, meanwhile, there is very little of anything Cajun – with one or two exceptions.

But I recently had an opportunity to find out more about Cajun history. While on holiday in Canada, I spent most of last week on the Gaspé peninsula in Québec. 

This region is one of the places where Acadian people, mostly originally from the west of France, found a home after being violently expelled by the British from their first North American settlements further to the south. Another new home was Louisiana, where they became the ancestors of the Cajuns.

Driving along the beautiful Gaspesian south coast, a place of marshland, rock and water dotted with villages and small towns, we counted nineteen Acadian flags. This (see image) is a French tricolour with a yellow star in the top left-hand corner representing the Stella Maris, a symbol of Virgin Mary, the patron saint of Acadians, in her role as a protector of seafarers.

At the Musée Acadien in the small town of Bonaventure, we learnt more about the Acadian community in Quebec. I discovered that Acadians make up 15 per cent of Quebec’s population and, as their flag suggests, seafaring and religion have traditionally been important parts of life for Acadians, just as they are for Cajuns. 

Some exhibitions in the museum even showed these two combined. A “passion bottle” held a crucifix where you might expect to see a ship, while “Calgary on a fish” represented the scene in paint on fish bones.

Acadians are also considered to be excellent carpenters, according to the museum. Characteristic features of Acadian-built houses include seaweed insulation, and scope to extend easily to accommodate big families, a common by-product of devout Catholicism.

The museum also illuminated the broader story of how Acadian history is a story of repeated uprootings and resettlement, largely spurred by military actions of my home country, the United Kingdom, but also other colonial actions.

From this, the Acadians have developed a talent for using opportunities to rejoice as a way to overcome hardship, said the museum. Their biggest celebration of the year, National Acadian Day, held on the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary – is coming up on 15 August.

Acadian celebrations typically include plenty of music and good food – dishes from the Acadian diaspora listed at the museum include “grand-peres”, poutine râpée, chiard de tetes, combuse, bourgaille, and gumbo.

Some family ties between elements of Acadian culture and those of Cajuns and New Orleanians will be discernible to anyone reading who knows Louisiana. (I was recently excited to hear of Tremé restaurant Gabrielle serving a delicious-sounding “Nova Scotia jambalaya” comprising “acadian rice, shrimp, langoustine, lobster, trinity vegetables and okra tomato sauce”). 

And this shared culture – its food and much more – is one that hopefully even those of us from London can now, unlike in some instances in the past, appreciate and value.

Jul 28

Vietnamese Communities In London And New Orleans

I remember drinking strong, sweet Vietnamese coffee – cà phê sữa đá – from a stall on Hackney’s Broadway Market the day after the opening ceremony for the London’s Olympics in 2012. At my favourite Vietnamese restaurant on Kingsland Road I always order the same thing: soft-shell crab followed by tofu pho. Sometimes I add fresh spring rolls with prawn.

I have also drunk Vietnamese coffee in New Orleans, racing into Magasin Vietnamese Cafe to escape the heat of Magazine Street on an August day. I have eaten banh mi in the city too, flaky New Orleans baguettes stuffed with meat, salad and chilli.

But it was having Vietnamese food in Paris that drew my attention to all the subtle ways that restaurants serving food from a particular ethnic tradition can alter their food to suit the place they are in. 

On my birthday I ate a Vietnamese entrée, plat and dessert in the traditional sequence – (dumplings, squid salad, and a coconut tapioca pudding). Meanwhile in the UK, Vietnamese restaurants often to follow the curry-house tradition of long menus, leading to tables filled with dishes. In New Orleans banh mi are often known as Vietnamese po-boys.

Food is always a good window into understanding how a community with roots in another country shapes and is shaped by the place it has come to.

In the UK the Vietnamese community is so concentrated in north-east London that one Vietnamese restaurant and shop-filled road – the place where I go for my pho – was once known as “Little Vietnam”. Now Vietnamese restaurants are found throughout London, including some upscale ones such as Damon Bui’s CôBa.

New Orleans is home to many people with Vietnamese heritage, but the community is not as large as those found in California and Texas, according to the New York Times. There is a good picture of Vietnamese New Orleans from the TV series Treme. Food is an in here for musician Sonny – working on a Vietnamese-owned shrimping boat gives him a chance to earn the respect of the father of Linh, the woman from a Vietnamese family who will eventually become his wife.

However, the Vietnamese community in New Orleans is decline, says the New York Times. Younger generations are moving away from the New Orleans East area, the heart of the Vietnamese community in the city as this was where the first waves of migrants settled. Or perhaps, as in London, it is just spreading out, it concludes. 

It is the way of immigrant – and all communities – to move and change. Though I would be sad to live in a city where I couldn’t get  a traditional bowl of pho.

Image: Kathryn

Jul 21

Finding Louisiana Food In London

One of the reasons I love writing this blog is because connections between London and New Orleans are often concealed ones, which is certainly the case with Plaquemine Lock.

This London Cajun/Creole restaurant and pub is tucked away behind Upper Street, the high street of the Angel neighbourhood in north London, not too far from Hackney, the area of London where I used to live. 

Dipping southerly, away from the traffic and shops, you come across suddenly quiet roads of  large terraced houses, big old trees, and water. Established in 2017 by Jacob Kenedy, London chef and the great-grandson of a woman who ceremonially opened a passage point between Louisiana’s Bayou Plaquemine and the Mississippi river, Plaquemine Lock is tucked away by Regent’s Canal, which slowly spreads across north London with something of the leisurely quality of the bayou.

Admittedly the location is not exactly the Crescent City but, as Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner wrote in his review of Plaquemine Lock when it first opened, “on a hot summer’s day, with the smell of diesel rising off the nearby Regent’s Canal, Islington is exactly like New Orleans. Kinda.”

The green-tiled exterior of Plaquemine Lock is pure English pub, but once you get inside you feel more like you’re in south-east Louisiana. The walls are carnival-gold, there are beads hanging from mirrors and lamps, and the staircase walls are bedecked with Audubon-style bird portraits: hoopoe, parrot, canary. Elsewhere there are works by Bywater folk artist Dr Bob, and Kenedy’s mother.

Then come the New Orleans-like smells – salty, then meaty, and something sweet too, which brings the promise of good food to come. 

The first time I ate at Plaquemine Lock was for a midwinter dinner, and it did not disappoint. First, dressed and fried oysters, both familiar in New Orleans but still a bit of a novelty in London. There, people tend to prefer them natural, in all their briny austerity. 

Our main dishes included an excellent meaty gumbo and some amazing fried chicken, probably the best I’ve ever had and easily good enough to convert me to a second helping of a dish I don’t normally like. 

These came with a handful of side dishes – I remember candied sweet potatoes, greens with pecans – and served “family-style”, that is, in large portions for everyone to share, a much better alternative to the “small plates” that have become so common in London in recent years. We ended with two pies: pecan and coconut cream, one dark and treacly and one snowy white, and both excellent.

My second visit was very recently, for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. My Hurricane was very good, the passionfruit juice on the bottom of the glass shooting up red through orange. Then a chocolate and pecan brownie, with cherries – an excellent summer addition.

Ripe berries remind me of a certain section of Lisa St Aubin de Teran’s memoir The Hacienda, which tells the story of seven years she spent on a Venezuelan estate as a young woman in an increasingly unhappy marriage. After talking to a young doctor about his liking for summer fruit, she says that for her berries are “charged permanently with a yearning, not for Europe, but for Venezuela, where they do  not grow.”

I think the food of Louisiana is some of the best in the world. But writing about Plaquemine Lock from Paris, which is ruled by orderly menu de jours, makes me miss not New Orleans but London, and all its rare and hidden pleasures.

Top image:  Howard Sooley