LONDON NEWS

TUPNews recommends you visit Crown Passage, in Mayfair, for lunch.

It’s helpful to know places in central London that feel tucked away and remote. I only recently discovered Hanway Street, a cosy mews full of bars, record shops and Korean restaurants that runs between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. You can lean drink-in-hand against the outside wall of the thoroughly excellent Bradley’s Tapas Bar (my favourite tapas bar in London, on the grounds that it doesn’t actually serve tapas) and watch the tourists, tracksuits and hi-fi shoppers walk within ten yards of you, completely oblivious to your presence. Very relaxing, I recommend it for a drink. For dinner, James Street never fails – pavement dining at cheap Turkish, Greek and Italian eateries lined up resort-style on a traffic-less road just a stone’s throw from the bustle of Bond Street. And for lunch, I now add Crown Passage, which I visited today.

I was acting on a tip-off; my former boss and fellow cheap eats aficionado Dave had told me about a place called Fuzzy’s Grub. Dave is the one who turned me on to the Monte Bianco Deluxe, served at Pepper’s just off Trafalgar Square, so I trust him totally. The MBD, or as we rechristened it, “The Motherfucker”, was the finest hangover cure known to man, disguised as a massive chicken escallop and mozzarella ciabatta sandwich. The trick was to ask for a little Tabasco sauce. Pepper’s changed management six months ago and scrapped the MBD, which I found devastating. Even worse than when the White Hart in Waterloo changed chefs and started serving just two types of potato with their Sunday lunch, rather than three.

So I dodged the crazy traffic around St. James Square, walked west down King Street and turned left down Crown Passage.

As it happens, Crown Passage is a heady Dickensian alleyway filled with suits seeking out lunchtime stops. There’s a vibrant 70s-style greasy spoon called Charlie’s (I think) that looked fantastic, as well as a few traditional Italian sandwich shops and a Clapham-esque sandwich bar with the baffling title Get The Foccaccia (“Get the fuck off ya?” I don’t get it.) A lone Pret sits cowed in the middle, looking self-consciously unobtrusive. They all looked great. But the queue for Fuzzy’s Grub was spilling out into the street, and I took my place at the back.

Fuzzy’s is more carvery than sandwich shop. There are only five fillings available: topside of beef, leg of lamb, loin of pork, turkey breast and chicken breast. About ten serving staff work shoulder to shoulder cutting slices of meat off of hefty roast joints. These cuts can either be served as a straightforward roast dinner, or crammed into a large doorstopper cut from thick farmhouse loaf. The awning outside proudly displays a painted Union Jack.

I plumped for a beef and horseradish sandwich, and was somewhat confused when I was then offered roast potatoes, stuffing and gravy. These came included in the price, so I said sure, imagining that they would be served as side orders. In fact, the serving girl crushed the potatoes with a spatula and stuck them on my sandwich, to my total delight. Stuffing was stuffed on and, audaciously, gravy poured all over the whole affair. I was so impressed that I paid the extra quid to eat in – a classic London stitch, perhaps, but it seemed barbarous to consume this work of art in my grey battery-farm of an office. I took a seat by the window and got stuck in.

Reader, this was the best sandwich I’ve ever had.

It was, I imagine, what sandwiches must have tasted like when they were first invented in the Earl of Sandwich’s kitchen: a whole dinner shoved between two massive pieces of bread. Tender, melt-in-the-mouth beef, crunchy roast potatoes, spot-on stuffing: absolutely fucking A. I remembered my French dining companion in Cannes; “Eat this, mademoiselle,” I thought, “and you will know that I am right.”

I thought also of a conversation I had recently with my brother’s girlfriend, who wanted to switch to organic meat but worried it would prove too pricey for her waitress wages. The solution, I suggested, was to start thinking of meat as a luxury rather than a staple: to eat less, but better. The same should apply to sandwiches, I realise now. Life is too short to eat lacklustre sandwiches.

The frosted windows of the Red Lion looked inviting, but solo lunchtime drinking is not really the thing. I popped round the corner to the Royal Legion headquarters to buy a replacement poppy, and walked off my lunch in St. James Park. November in London is truly beautiful.

EUROPE NEWS

TUPNews recently visited Cannes, on the southeast coast of France. It was my last business trip of the year.

It’s not as swish as I imagined; in fact the approach from Nice airport called to mind Weymouth. The landmark hotels look pretty ordinary, and the seafront is mostly touristy fish restaurants and private beaches. In fairness, all of my preconceptions about Cannes were based on the video for Elton John’s I’m Still Standing, so it had a lot to live up to. And the nightlife was not bad: I ate a fantastic steak in a restaurant that had apparently been interior-decorated by a five-year-old girl, and then paid £10 for a tumbler of single malt in a try-hard Turkish-themed bar.

I was in town to attend a conference, but I wasn’t much in the mood for it. Instead, I headed down to the municipal beach, about a five-minute walk from my hotel on Rue d’Antibes, one of the flashier shopping streets. Well-attired Eurotrash regarded me with a mixture of confusion, disgust and fear as I walked down the street: among the distressed denim and designer sunglasses, I cut a fine figure in my no-name jumper, black trunks and sockless brown trainers. Hotel-logo’d beach towel slung over my shoulder and the Alan Clark diaries tucked under my arm, I was a strange mix of beach bum and English eccentric. What with it being mid-October, the beach was quiet, but the sky was bright and the water was warm. “I like Cannes,” I thought, floating on my back.

That night I attended a lavish banquet at a grand chateau a little ways out of the city. The host, a major French energy company, will shortly float on the stock exchange, so this was something of a last hurrah. The champagne flows less freely when there are shareholders involved, unfortunately. So we got stuck in while we still could.

I sat next to a charming French girl (is there any other kind?) and argued about British and French attitudes to food. The British have no clue, she said – having recently attended an excellent cheese festival in Cheltenham, I put her straight on the quality of British produce. “Just eat this fish,” she said, pointing her fork at me, “and you will see that I am right.”

She also told me that English men speaking French in English accents is attractive in the same way that French women speaking English in French accents is. I was very pleased to learn this.