‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.’
The French politician Anthelme Brillat-Savarin spoke these words some two hundred years ago, long before the sterility of the fast food chains. The French, as you may be aware, take their food very seriously, and I cannot help but wonder what he would have had to say about a generation of people who regularly receive their daily bread by ‘going large’ out of a king size family bargain bucket. I would like to think it would have run along the along the lines of ‘tell me where you eat, that I may be elsewhere.’
I know that you find my ambivalence toward all fast food chains a little, how shall we say, snobby? Puzzlingly perverse perhaps? Or even obdurate to the point of um, well quaint? Well, there may well be a grain of truth in all of that, but none of it is the real reason for my aversion. I do try. I tell myself that it is only lunch or whatever, but there is just something about sitting down to eat in the middle of an acre of colour coded, product themed, bright’n’shiney plasticized surfaces that irritates the hell out of me.
Cloaked, as these places are, in anonymity, a Mctuckyhut-any-town is exactly that. A seemingly endless series of buildings strategically strung out across the country, all mired in their own self imposed mediocrity, and serving food that exactly matches the surroundings, thus making it the gastronomic equivalent of a Britney Spears album. Yum.
But, putting all that to one side, the truth is I’ve been spoiled for these places by one backstreet restaurant that ceased to exist over a quarter of a century ago. This was a place that would have been totally out of step with today’s health and safety conscious, utility-minded ethos. Nothing bespoke here, everything seemingly salvaged from other lives and bent to purpose, and that purpose was pizza. But that is to sell it short, for what happened in that twisted old building lifted the experience to something higher than just the culinary, for they took that one simple dish and made it an art form.
As is always the way, it was there for a season and then gone. In this case the building that it occupied was up for redevelopment and, as a consequence, I have not tasted a pizza worthy of the name in the last twenty-five years. But if I close my eyes and concentrate I can still conjure up the sights, the sounds, the smells, and yes dammit, the taste…
Strung between the commercial bustle of Corn market and the pedestrian squeeze of New Inn Hall Street there lies, right in the heart of the city, a lovely little backwater of Oxford serenity called St. Michaels street. Despite the rampant commercialism that exists at either end of its boundaries, it has managed to retain a cool and aloof disdain from all the modern day madness that conducts itself just yards from either of its portals.
The street itself is not without a certain amount of commerce, as it boasts a bookshop, a café, a restaurant and a pub, all sedately nestled between a neat fronted terrace of town houses, solicitor’s offices and a church. The pub, itself quaint and sedate of edifice, looks as if it has been there forever, but that is just a slight of an architect’s hand, for it has not.
Thirty-three years ago the space now inhabited by the pub was a wonderful, ramshackle two-storey building called, quite simply, St. Michael’s Pizza cellar. To gain access you climbed the three or four stone steps and entered through a cramped doorway to where wooden stairs took over. These were broad, gnarled and worn and as much a social area as anywhere else in the building. They twisted away into the dappled gloom in both an upward and downward direction, allowing access to the three whitewash walled rooms that thronged with the young, and the not so young of Oxford. The music was good, and it was loud. The air was filled with both expectancy and a delicious mix of aromas that whispered of mushroom, mozzarella, garlic and onions, fresh herb and freshly tossed greens, all bound together by the twin elixirs, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Candles, stuffed into crusty and musty old wine bottles were the only source of light. They threw their uncertain illumination onto collections of miss-matched cutlery splayed across rustic, check clothed tables, which were in turn surrounded by a their own hotchpotch collection of rickety wooden chairs. It was hot, sweaty, chaotic and vibrant. It was, in short, the only place to be on a Sunday evening. There in the dancing gloom we would convene, me and the gang, huddled around a corner table, laughing and talking over and across each other as we waited for ‘The Egg’ (our nickname for our regular and beautiful waitress) to come and join the revels for as long as she dared, before leaving with our order.
I have said convene, but what I should have said was reconvene, because our Sunday sessions were wont to start in an Abingdon pub around about midday. Afternoons were invariably spent at Phil and Mary’s lovely little house on the outskirts of the town. There we would listen to music, (they had a wonderfully eclectic collection of vinyl) play chess or scrabble, argue over books or films whilst, all the while, gently imbibing wines with a variety of cheeses. These memories run like a golden thread through the tapestry of my existence. This was, of course, the fag end of the seventies and so convention demanded that there be a fairly large ingestion of tobacco going on, with whatever additives people had been considerate enough to bring with them. In short, we all had friends who had friends by a river. If you don’t understand that last sentence it’s because you are too young, or too old, or of course, too stoned.
The fellowship was a fairly elastic affair, one week would see just three or four of us present, the following week could find the ranks swollen to some eight or nine souls, but one thing was a constant at the gatherings, and that was an unswerving friendship and a sense of belonging. Apart from myself (who couldn’t seem to find a girl dumb enough to hang around for too long) the rest of the crew seemed, to my slightly envious eyes, to be pretty settled.
Thus it was that week after month after year, the pizza crew, Phil and Mary, (clever) Trevor and Pauline, Gary and Sandra plus CW and whoever, together with assorted friends and etceteras, would leave the quiet little close in Abingdon and wend our way to the shadowy, heavenly scented set of rooms that invariably rounded off our weekend. Once clustered around our table the menu was produced and perused, but it was purely for form, everybody knew exactly what they were having, indeed had known, long before they entered the haloed portals. Everybody had a favourite dish and tended to stick to it.
The pizza produced in this establishment was as unique as the place itself, opulent is a word that springs to mind, also succulent, plump and glossy. Damn, their pizza was a gastronomic tone poem. Of course we always opted for the healthier and more sensible approach by sharing a pizza or two amongst the gathering, didn’t we? Actually, no. The Sunday night pizza gathering was an exercise in true democracy, one man, one pizza.
I seem to remember that a certain amount of training was required before one could successfully finish off a whole pizza single handedly, some indeed never acquired the necessary conditioning. One had to gird one’s loins and loosen one’s belt before reaching deep down into the soul to search for the stamina, the fortitude and the dogged determination required to complete this Herculean task. Or to put it another way, they weren’t just beautiful, they were bloody huge.
Thus it was that Sunday after Sunday the faithful would answer the call and ingest carbs before the alter of pizza perfection. We were a gathering, a circle of friends. Unthinkingly we trod this earthly stage and raised our glasses against the morrow. Even if we had been able to recognise them, we wouldn’t have been able to hear the warnings above the laughter in our ears, and that, perhaps, is as it should be. For many years on, and all that made the fellowship so special is as nothing. All the souls who worked and ate at this place, once released, spun off on their own little orbits to revolve in and around new solar systems. Indeed, all the pairings and connections that made up our little stellar system slowly sundered one from another until today all that remains is one man’s aging memories, and a building that shouldn’t be there.
Enjoy what you have whilst you have it.
Love‘n’stuff,
Chris Wilson White.
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