Revisiting the scenes of my youth

I've lived in London for an astonishing ten years now, so the miserable days when i lived out on the far-off reaches of the Central Line have more or less faded from my mind.
The one aspect of living in Leytonstone that was an unalloyed pleasure was the wonderful, wonderful Singburi Royal Thai Cafe.
Eleven years ago, Tony and Thelma bought a fish fry bar on Leytonstone High Road and started frying fish and chips. Tony, however, loves cooking the food of his native Thailand, so the regulars soon started to spend more on the red Thai curries or the phad thai noodles that were also available than on the boring old fish and chips.
So they ripped out the fry bar (but left the backlit panel on the wall above it, just covering it up with posters from the Thai Ministry of Food), bought some tables and chairs, moved the kitchen into a back room and set up shop as Singburi.
My housemates and I discovered it early and ate there regularly. The menu had all the usual Thai standards, done to an extremely high standard, and on quiet evenings, we would ask if Tony had anything special going on. Usually he would have picked up something interesting at the market and have put together some unexpected dish. Minced quail, sweet-roasted dried beef, massaman curry - even minced frog.
On busy evenings, we stuck to those menu dishes we knew were exceptional: tom kha gai (coconut chicken soup), gang paneang neu (a dry coconut beef curry), roast duck curry, phad thai. And it was never so busy that Thelma couldn't stop to greet us fondly, or come over for a giggly chat at some point. 
After a couple of years, I left Leytonstone, and soon thereafter lost all touch with the people I had known at that time of my life, but I never forgot Tony and Thelma. Every now and then, I would check online to make sure they were still going, and plan to go back there just to see if I had imagined how good it was.
Finally a couple of weeks ago, the Man and I drove over. We pushed open the door to familiar smells and Thelma - six years older but still as smiley - welcoming us in.
It was unchanged!
Ok, I realised on closer inspection that some of the chairs were new and the fish tank near the door has gone, but the weaver birds' nests still hang in the window with little toy koala bears clinging to them, the menu is unchanged (except for the addition of a specials board) and the food is just as good.
As we ordered, I realised Thelma was looking at me carefully - she slowly recognised me despite six years' absence and a lot of changes.
The crowning joy of the evening was that although the back-lit panel has gone, replaced by a wall of photos of jolly meals at Singburi (I even found a few old acquaintances), the very best Ministry of Food poster has been upgraded from blu-tak to frame. It is an artfully lit photo of rambutans with the caption: "Bushy, juicy".

The perks of the job

I have mentioned before that my job has certain perks and that I take shameless advantage of the culinary ones.
The latest was outstanding. I was invited to a dinner at the chef's table in Gordon Ramsay in Claridges, with the head sommelier (a champagne specialist), a delightful Italian waiter called Lello, the head chef, the senior sous chef and various other functionaries dancing smiling attendance on us.
Course after course arrived, each with its own carefully chosen bottle of wine. Highlights include the bacon, egg and chips that constituted the starter: parma ham, a poached quail's egg and the most extraordinary "chips" made out of chickpea flour. The illusion of the worker's caff was completed by the bottle of red pepper ketchup. Fortunately they drew the line at the mug of tea.
Fortified by this, we set out on a tour of the kitchen.
Let me remind you that this is a top end restaurant in the middle of the dinner service. All six of us were conducted through the sweating, shouting arena, past unbelievably hot stoves and a kitchen brigade of some 15 people dedicated to producing each dish looking perfect and coordinated so that each element - garnish, meat or fish, sauce and vegetables - arrived on the plate piping hot when the waiter was ready to take it from the pass.
And yet they managed to produce welcoming smiles for us as we asked fatuous questions and ooohed and aaahed about how hot it was or how fast they were working.
Back at the table, the head chef asked for volunteers. And this is how Kimberley, Gill and myself all ended up learning how to plate up the fish course in a real chef's kitchen.
(Tip: it helps to have fingers that don't get burnt easily).
It probably wouldn't be kind to go into too much detail about the venison wellington with truffle potato puree, or the bottles of Condrieu or Pouilly-Fumé that contributed so much to my reaching a state of euphoric stupefaction by the end of the evening.
The carefully selected cheeseboard we can pass over, as the Sachertorte with blackberry sorbet, but I must just mention the little balls of hazelnut icecream they produced on request. Mmm.

'Snot fair

Is it fair for a restaurant to have only a set menu, admittedly with a wide and excellent array of choices, but with only a three course option?

If you didn't want a large and elaborate pudding after two delicious but substantial savoury courses, the options were to pay a £4 supplement for cheese, or accept that you've paid £40 for two courses.

This does not seem entirely fair play to me. I suppose that's their business model, but given how pricey their drinks were, how hard they worked to sell us champagne (the sommelier wheeled over a trolley of the stuff as soon as we sat down) and how ginormous said puddings were, surely they could manage to stretch their margins in some way that didn't leave the customers feeling bullied and cheated?

But the view was wonderful!