243. Sunday Lunch At Pulperia.

I reported how much joy I had experienced at Aktar Islam’s Pulperia when I had indulged myself in the excellent Sunday lunch served there back in September last year (how rapidly time passes, see Blog 181 and also 172) and having good friends visiting from New Zealand this seemed like a perfect place to take them for Sunday lunch and to demonstrate to them just how fine this English traditional meal can be.

Now £28 for two courses (£25 last autumn but given everything that’s happening in the national economy one can hardly complain) I reordered the dishes I had pleasured myself with 8 months ago. Once more I chose the delightfully tasty chorizo starter served with tomato. What can I say other than I would gladly eat a plate of it every day?

Then the magnificent Argentinian roast beef itself. Beautifully cooked and seasoned, perfectly tender and pleasingly tasty, it was accompanied by all manner of trimmings - a fine Yorkshire pudding, creamed shredded cabbage, truffled cauliflower cheese, splendid roast potatoes and nicely cooked roast heritage carrots with a little blob of flavourful caramelised onion purée. There was more than enough for all of us and we were one happy Englishman and two happy New Zealanders. As before I had nothing more complicated than ice cream to finish but I concluded that Pulperia has kept up its superb standards, remains a great pleasure to visit and it’s hard to think that its Sunday lunch can be bettered especially in terms of value, service and the excellence of the food.

The pleasure derived from lunch at Pulperia was a great relief having dined the previous evening at a rather alarming school reunion (the first I had attended in fifty years) where very ancient men were constantly reassuring each other of how young they looked, greedily glugging the accompanying wine in quantities that suggested it was going out of fashion and shovelling down food of a slightly less than middling quality - a not particularly pleasant pâté, a tiresome but accurately cooked blade of beef accompanied by some grim vegetables (though a potato fondant was really rather good) and a surprisingly pleasingly tasty lemon tart. Having been to two of these affairs in the past month or so I am saddened that they are used as an opportunity to present generally dull dishes of varying qualities. It can not be easy to cater for hundreds of people but the Shakespeare Birthday lunch I reported in Blog 236 showed that it is indeed possible to present excellent, interesting, delicious dishes on such occasions to such diners but clearly if they want something special the diners have got to be prepared to fork out a goodly sum of money for the upmarket food.

We regularly pontificate on how much the quality of good English food has changed in these last fifty years but, not for the first time, I’m not so sure. These two dispiriting reunion meals suggest to me that most Englishmen are really not all that sophisticated about the food they’re eating even if a lot of them, or at least their wives, like to go around photographing what they’re being served. Most men, when given the choice, will opt for steak and chips and rarely bother if the cook/chef has not even cooked that accurately. There is much that is mediocre out there, some of it even masquerading as ‘Fine Dining’ (certainly sold at Fine Dining prices) and it will be the huge piece of the iceberg of English catering as long as English tastes allow it to continue to exist. Myself, I intend to avoid any mass catering events for a good while now, as they really are awful in the main. I shall endeavour however to make sure I get my hands on a ticket to next year’s Shakespeare Birthday lunch because that is a great example of just how things like mass catering really should be done.