On food trends and London in August
I step out onto the street. The morning coolness feels good on my skin. Seagulls cackle. Squirls climb onto trees. Pigeons pick away at what looks like last night’s sick. Disney but make it London style. The bus is only a few minutes away. Then onto the tube. A smooth ride. The only person around this time of day is the guy twice my age who asks me about the book I’m reading. Then asks me where I live. Then asks me where he can get the book. I step off the tube still wondering whether he wanted the answer to be ‘Between my tits’ or whether he was just one of those Christian missionaries intrigued by the book’s title ‘Death of a Lesser God’. (Sometimes I’m amazed at the pervert/se logic my brain comes up with to make life as a women bearable.) But this morning I cannot waste time on creeps. I am on a hunt for crumbs. I get off at Leicester Square station, a short walk, a brief exchange and I am sat down opposite what I can only describe as a work of art.
Rich flaky pastry. Seductive swirls of creamy pistachio variegato (it doesn’t matter that it’s unclear what this is). A crumbly coat of ground-down pistachios. A sprinkle of freeze-dried raspberry crystals. The lightest of sugar dustings. Having pined over a million and one photos and manicured clips online, how can the real thing ever measure up to my expectations? Now that I finally have the pastry of my dreams in front of me, it is stickier than I imagined and somehow, I can’t decide whether it smells funny. London summer on a serving tray. The cleaning truck washing yesterday’s grime into the gutters shakes me out of my musings. Suddenly I have a vision of myself. Sitting in this pink café. Emily in Paris but with bin bags out front. At 8.30am. On a Sunday. In August.
How the hell did I end up here?!
Like with so many other things, London operates in a separate sphere when it comes to food trends. And this summer, no digestible item encapsulates its craze-forming ability better than the once unassuming pistachio, at base a snot-coloured squidge of a thing. As a staunch eschewer of social media hypes, the pistachio has crept into my consciousness from the periphery. For years, I had nut tunnel vision; the biggest indulgence being the occasional bag of pecan nuts when I was feeling fancy while buying my usual serving of almonds and walnuts at Lidl (best ever value for money!).
During the pandemic, I upgraded my nut game, indulging in a weekly three-weekly almond croissant at my local bakery. It was here where I was first introduced to the concept of pistachio cream, glistening alluringly on morning buns and cannoli. The off-brand pistachio cream jars for sale a testament to the artisanal origins of the product and an explanation for the staff’s repeated attempts to lure me into the pistachio game. My nut-shed moment (Note to self: check whether in English ‘nut’ is used as a euphemism for testicles. If so, consider limiting use) came in the shape of the pistachio croissant. One bite of its mouth-coating goodness and I was converted.
Part of the pistachio allure was being a member of this secret club (read cult) of pistachio cream devotees. But with any good thing in London, there comes a moment when the big city ghoul comes and says ‘Like your pistachio cream? Then how do you like it on steroids?!’ (which I’m sure you can get as some kind of pistachio flavoured powder by now).
And so today in London you can easily find:
Knafeh & Pistachio Chocolate bars , Pistachio fistek tarts, Pistachio cherry tarts, Pistachio cube croissants, Pistachio chocolate swirls , Pistachio buns, Pistachio Gelato Bombs, Pistachio croissant cones, Pistachio iced coffees, Pistachio éclairs, Pistachio chocolate pains suisses, Pistachio and Yuzu Paris Brests, Pistachio pancakes, Pistachio raspberry escargots.
The satisfaction you can derive from actually consuming the pistachio product decreasing with every meter and minute spent queuing to get your hands on the latest invention.
And yet, I still couldn’t forget the Pistachio Raspberry Pastry at Donutelier that I stumbled across one late Friday evening last June. To my chagrin, the bakery is the kind of place where you can buy a denim bucket hat with the bakery logo, but you can’t get your coffee served in anything other than a paper cup (PRIORITIES?!). It combines all the characteristics of food hype places I normally abhor:
- A name with a faux French touch and worse, insisting on describing ingredients with a perfectly usable English term in French (you can’t fool me with your fancy Chantilly, it’s plain old whipped cream everybody)
- Highly instagrammable furnishings
- Combining multiple trend ingredients in one (pistachio plus yuzu, pistachio plus freeze-dried raspberries etc.)
- Emphasis on artisanal production
- Prices you would never consider paying if it wasn’t for all of the above
- Insane queues
- And last but not least, a drip-feed of suggested scarcity, i.e. moments when some creations will simply become ‘unavailable’
Still, what is the problem you might ask? Sheer social hype snobbery on my part? Categoric refusal to queue for non-essential food items? It is not just my pride that has been stopping me from submitting to my pastry fantasies. But it is August my friends and the bakery is located in Soho. If you’ve never been here during this time of the year, let me elaborate. On any normal day, Soho is like an ant hill, crammed in a shoe box, high on car and fast food fumes, with all the ants mercilessly jostling to get discount tickets to the Harry Potter play while being chased by angry cab drivers. To get a sense of what it’s like in August, picture this shoe box on fire and with twice the number of usual ants. You’ll start to get an idea of what’s it’s like to try and walk down Charing Cross Road in a straight line. INFURIATING.
I suspect it’s the scarcity element that ultimately kicked me into gear. There is nothing like a bit of now-or-never je-ne-sais-quoi to reduce any human to their elbow-pushing, queue-jumping, only-thing-I-can-think-about-is-chewing essence. So, with no neuron left that could suggest I should feel ashamed of myself, this is how I ended up in Soho at 8am on a Sunday. My cunning plan to beat the crowds on the final stretch to my scrumptious pistachio story crowning crumb.
As I raise the pastry to my mouth, I am surprised by its lightness. The first hint at the lack of substance behind the hype. And yet, I bite. The mouthfeel is … satisfying. The pastry is of a pleasurable thickness. It offers enough resistance for a satisfying crunch but not so much as to result in chewiness. I wait for the pistachio notes to hit my palate.
And I wait. And I wait. And I wait. This is the taste of ignoring your better judgment. The dainty (measly would be the appropriate term) pistachio cream swirl topping the pastry remains the only bit of pistachio hint in the experience. With my taste buds on a desperate search for what they were promised, the meaning of the earlier mentioned ‘variegato’ dawns on me: ‘in this pastry you can find varying ingredients – some of which may be pistachio’.
So, I’m not ready to die after eating this. But at least I can go home and back to bed in peace. Because I live here, and I can do that without fomo. Micro-doszing on the madness one pistachio at a time.