Sophie has been on a salutary visit to the memory land of lockdown…
Last Sunday my partner and I went out to a very special dinner — to remember and reflect on lockdown, five years on. The invitation had come out of the blue from a pair of our favourite restaurants. And we nearly didn’t go.
First, I was deep in painful editing and only checked my emails when I couldn’t bear to look at my MS any longer. So I nearly missed the incoming email.
Then I havered. As the invitation said, the event was to mark “a time when everything felt lost.” Well, the editing was making me edgy. Did I really want to re-visit those days of empty streets and deserted buildings?
But then I focused on the important bit — “a time when everything felt lost, but also when people got together to find a way through.”
Domestic Lockdown at home
Yes, we did find a way, the Birdwatcher and I.
Not immediately. At first, we didn’t see each other for six weeks, though we spoke on the phone every night.
“Still alive?”
“So far.”
And then, deciding it was within the rules, we met in a deserted car park and walked through the wilder bits of Hampton Court Park in spring sunshine.
We kept the required distance apart. There were violets by the hedgerow. We saw a busy moorhen and her family on the pond.
Then we sat and watched sandpipers, while the sun glinted on the water of a mini lake. Over the far side, a couple of Egyptian geese had a bad-tempered slanging match. A buzzard drifted in the high sky. There was a soft breeze, quite warm, and it brought the scent of blossom from somewhere. All felt right with the world.
OK, it was only Right For Now. But Right For Now is bloody brilliant after six weeks in solitary. Or any time really. Lockdown taught me that.
Remembering, I said, “Actually, I think I’d really like to go to this dinner. There’s stuff I want to remember and pay attention to. And I really liked what those restaurants did in lockdown. What they started. They gave us hope, I think.”
“So let’s go for it,” said the Birdwatcher. As, indeed, he said in spring 2020 and continued to say, as lockdown came and went and came again thereafter. Bless him.
The Restaurant We Knew First …
…was Kitchen W8 in Kensington. We originally discovered it many years before Covid. It is cool and cosy, which you would think impossible until you actually get there.
Comfortable chairs, quiet buzz of conversation, kindly lighting – and the silvery wallper carries images of birds that are painted precisely enough to be identifiable by a Birdwatcher With Standards. (They may be waxwings? I’m not the expert, and I’m not sure I remember.)
Chef Mark Kempson’s food is remarkable. You can taste each individual ingredient, and some of the combinations are startling but always delicious. Unsurprising since he’s had a Michelin star since 2011. (We’re gratified that Michelin agree with us.) Even Kitchen W8’s gluten free bread is unique and tasty.
It’s our place for celebration but also comfort and consolation – as when I broke my wrist earlier this year. We feel at home there. We even have a favourite corner. By 2020 we were regulars.
Sister Restaurants and Lockdown
Oddly, Elystan Street is closer to my house geographically. Maybe too close. I used to walk past the building almost daily, when I was on my way to see my friend Stephen Jenn who lived in a nearby building. But in those days, it was still a pub. Stephen moved and, well, I had no reason to walk past it any more.
The Birdwatcher and I didn’t really wake up to it until Lockdown #1.
It was Elystan’s chef and owner, Phil Howard — he’s also co-owner of Kitchen W8 — who welcomed us last Sunday. Elystan also has a Michelin star, incidentally.
He gave a short account of their Lockdown #1 experience. March 23rd 2020 had been devastating. The hospitality industry was closed down. Its workers felt vulnerable, exposed and chefs came near to despair. The present was bleak and the future imponderable. Workers had to do whatever they could.
Along with his family and and team of Head Chefs, he started to cook to feed hospital staff in the Royal Marsden and Brompton Hospitals.
Eventually the three restaurants (at the time they included Church Road in Barnes) came up with the idea of cooking for a home-delivery service on select evenings, along with a wheeze to cover immediate funding.
All three were clearly already positioned as neighbourhood restaurants. Now they invited regular customers to buy vouchers, cash now for meals in the future, whenever that might turn out to be. It worked.
The Birdwatcher and I were among those who took this up. And it was a bit of a lifeline for us too — the first time we felt we were actually doing something useful in response to the Covid nightmare. Can’t tell you how good that felt! I can still almost taste the reief. A bit like peppermint, with the same zing of good energy. At last a foot in a possible real future!
5th Anniversary of Covid Lockdown #1 Dinner
The food was perfect, delicious yet with clever reminders of the days we were thinking about. The chefs divided the courses between them. With Mark Kempson cooking the main course of rolled and stuffed saddle of lamb, we revelled in aromatic pesto and roasted shallots absorbing the fattiness of the lamb in a perfect combination. Every single taste was a discreet pleasure.
Phil did the mixed seafood hors d’oeuvres. They came in small individual pots packed in a familiar brown paper carrier. We were gleeful when we saw them. I remember so clearly unpacking those alluring parcels, menu list in hand, taking off lids, sniffing, tasting, wondering… It was exactly the same experience, only this time we were doing it in comradely company with a very full restaurant. We laughed a lot and savoured and discussed and remembered how much we had luxuriated in doing those things back then too.
No, life wasn’t all bad, even though I was sort of frozen a lot of the time, especially in the beginning.
A magic picnic is a great unfreezer. Like poor Sarah in A Little Princess when Ram Dass leaves his Indian feast for her to find in her attic.
Or brave Charity eating her wonderful recovery meal in Marseilles after wartime rationing in England and driving for her life through France in marvellous Mary Stewart’s Madam, Will You Talk?. Oh, if I could only write like that. Just remembering it makes my mouth water.
And those hors d’oevres, the taste, the colours, intriguing textures, fleeting aromas, they made up an absolute tapestry for the senses!
Phil had said that one of the best things about starting to do their home dining experiment, was that the wonderful weather gave them marvellous fresh produce to work with. That freshness of imminent spring was what I tasted in those hors d’oeuvres.
The mackerel pate, with tiny cubes of crisp cucumber was strong and refreshing at the same time, moutwatering and a fabulous contrast to the shrimp on the one hand and the deliciously salt-sticky salt cod (a long time favourite) on the other. And more.. and more…
But by then I had disconnected brain and was on a cloud of delight that you get with a really good book. Only it comes with that sense of being cared for, which good cooking gives you, especially when you’re among friends.
Among Friends and Fellows…
I need not have worried about disaster-sharing. Though the restaurant seemed to me to be completely full, the conversation was positive, if occasionally philosophical. Tall windows and high ceilings (and kindly lighting again) kept it from feeling crowded. And the staff, who hardly seemed to stop, worked with a businesslike good cheer that lifted the heart.
At the table to my left was a family with one very small child and one still in babygrow, both contentedly beaming. We beamed back, but were too far away to chat with either smalls or parents. To my left. however, was (when we introduced ourselves) photographer John Carey, a specialist in food and chefs.
He was OK under Lockdown to begin with, he said. Nice weather, a garden, spending time with the family. But the financial implications began to dawn and, even more perhaps, he missed his work and the chefs who were his clients and friends.
He formulated a project. In contrast to the colour and and vitality of his usual working milieu, he would record it post apocolypse. He wanted to make images “real, raw, completely stripped back” of the chefs in their empty restaurants.
Chefs in Lockdown
The result was Chefs in Lockdown, a truly astonishing book of black and white portraits. He asked the chefs to think about their situation and the results are truly remarkable, even mesmerising. Every one of them, it seems, is held on pause for a moment, essentially alone. Many of the chefs have provided fascinating thoughts on their experience of Lockdown.
I have a copy and I keep coming back to it. Empty chairs and empty tables truly do make you dread the What Next? Phil Howard, arms folded, is there on page 150, in Elystan Street with every table in sight covered with brown paper carriers. A man who has stopped on the mountain and doesn’t know how much longer the climb will take.
But the image that stopped me dead in my tracks and still makes me a bit shocky is on page 26-27. Not empty chairs and empty tables but a man alone, in his working apron, looking at himself in a big mirror. The mirror image is composed, resolute even. But then you look away from the mirror, at the whole man, and you see his hands, hanging loose in front of him. No knife or ladle or whisk. Just hanging. Idle.
Stunning. And very, very sobering.
These images are really thought-provoking works of art. A selection are now exhibited at Fortnum and Mason’s 3’6 Bar until 18th May. You can also buy the book there. I haven’t been yet. But I really must,
Lockdown in Memory
As you will see, we had a lovely evening, with lots of rewards and the steadying reminder that we have and had very much to be grateful for before, after and even during Lockdown. But the experience has not slipped out of my nervous system and into the the archive. I doubt that it ever will. And probably best that it stays right where it is.There may well still be lessons to learn.
Sophie
What a splendid, splendid post. It’s very easy to push down that memory, two years of limbo. But it is important to remember it, and to remember how we got through it and what we learned from it.
Charity’s meal in Marseilles was exactly the right image. Thank you.
Thank you, Jan. It was a really special evening and certainly made me remember in a sort of three dimensional way.
Oh, Mary Stewart’s description of food is just amazing. The picnic in the little boy’s room in Nine COaches Waiting is another meal I feel I almost ate myself. I’m sure rationing must have honed her appreciation of French food when she was writing them in the early fifties. But then she was good on all the senses.
Lovely, Jenny, thank you
So glad you enjoyed it, Melanie.
Fascinating descriptions of the food you had in those brown paper bags. What a lovely memory. There were upsides to lockdown. Hearing the birds and even the bees, seeing plant life thrive and animals loving a new-found freedom, sometimes investigating in the towns – you could imagine them asking where are all the people? Being something of a homebody, I quite enjoyed the isolation, the lack of demands on my time, and the start of my lockdown hobby – learning Klingon – which I have kept up to this day. It was a weird time, but in no way forgotten.
Sounds as if you were really creative during that time, Liz. Wish I’d done better.
I’ve always been impressed by your Klingon facility. Is it all off the page or do you have conversation classes on Zoom or something?
I did attend zoom chats at one time, but frankly they didn’t really help me learn to speak. So it’s mainly translating into Klingon, and from Klingon that’s been translated from English – back-translating. Like Hamlet and Alice in Wonderland. I do that, I keep up with Duolingo, and I practice words to try and keep them in my head. More difficult as the years go on…
Loved this blog. Uplifting I think.
What a lovely, thoughtful blog, Sophie. It made me think back and appreciate just how inventive we all were to get ourselves through it – a sort of Blitz spirit. You and your lovely chefs are quite right not to forget what we all went through.