You’d think they’d get it. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that when the world falls on your head, you might do something different. It’s like Moses. Comes down from the mountain, still smelling of burning bush, eyes revolving, levitating with the true believer’s va-va-voom, and he bellows: “God, the God — Mr God to you — just gave me these instructions, written in sodding marble, and it's going to get us out of here. After 40 years in this hole, we’re going home. Milk and honey, vineyards, fedoras. Listen up.”
Then a bloke at the back says: “Well now, hold on. Hold on. Maybe we shouldn’t be hasty in discarding the golden calf. Granted, it’s been a bit tricky recently, but it just needs a bit of tweaking. Have you ever thought that perhaps what we need is a bigger golden calf?”
And that’s when Moses loses the plot, and throws a right strop. Not only did God give him celestial sat-nav, he also gave him a proper, Old Testament, fundamental fire-and-brimstone temper. (That and a foreskin, which was something of a novelty for the Jewish ladies.) Anyway, I’m with Moses. Not only the foreskin bit, but I’m just about to have an exodus tantrum.
What is it that restaurants don’t get about their customers? Seeing as customers are poorer than they were last year, their suppliers are being straitened, their manufacturers are shuffling to the edge. What is it about restaurants that makes them think the normal rules don’t apply? I’ve lost count of the number of managers and owners who’ve taken me aside and said, “Touch wood, the times don’t really seem to be affecting us.” Which bit of the global economy do they imagine doesn’t apply to them or their customers? Even if all you feed are bailiffs and accountants, that’s not the point. This is a moment when you need to look at yourself in the mirror of what you do, and realise it isn’t good enough. It might have been all right then, but it’s not all right now. You can’t go on selling squander and snobbery. Customers want to be fed from a different menu; they want to feel differently about themselves.
This week’s review isn’t so much a criticism as a parable. It is about a place that has so comprehensively failed to notice the change in the weather, that is so utterly out of step, desperately, sadly passé, and embarrassingly over, that it should be called The Bigger Golden Calf. Instead, it’s called Daylesford Organic, in Westbourne Grove, in London’s crunched and conflicted Notting Hill. It is a small, self-satisfied chain that’s been unloaded from the mother shop, which is a sort of Cotswold Westfield, selling everything you’ve never wanted for that cashmere lifestyle. At its heart, it is a food shop of such towering pretension and expense that only those who are bored and weepingly depressed enough to live in Oxfordshire can appreciate. A passing friend told me he’d gone in to buy some cheese, “but I only had £196 on me”.
The Westbourne version is situated on premises that were a previous organic grocer, before being bought out by the American organic grocer Whole Foods, which promptly closed the venue down. Don’t you love wholesome, green capitalism? So now there is a shop that truly defies description. I don’t know what it thinks it is. It sells horn-handled trowels for people who do one-handed gardening. . There are bits of rustic scratchy stuff that might be for sitting on, lying under, or tying in a tasteful bow around your head, but are probably only for putting in a drawer. It’s staffed by sad women who have been employed because they look like Victorian scullery maids, and almost curtsey when you come in. Next to it is another shop, selling foodish things. It isn’t a food shop in any useful sense; nobody would bring a list here. It sells edible knick-knacks, Valium-induced impulse buys for people whose other impulses include painting their dining-room tables white and distressing them with a bicycle chain, and slicing their arms with broken lead-crystal glass.
There is a restaurant and, downstairs, another restaurant. Upstairs, it’s a cramped little cafe. We sat in the window, watching Notting Hill pass by, like straggling refugees from Kosovo.same dear deer that lost its head to the gardening equipment. The meat was covered in some concoction that made it taste like a medieval poultice for boils. English vegetables were roots that you could tell were English because they were flaccid and politely tastelessNot that a girl should know of such things...
