Table talk
Escabitch, escabeeshee - sod it, I'll have steak
Epicurus, the new restaurant run by chef Gary Witchalls at the Leather Bottle pub in Blackmore, Essex, is going down well with the locals. But Witchalls has found that the menu language he has used in the past does not always work in Essex. "We did have escabeche of salmon on the menu, but not only do a lot of diners not know what it is, they are too embarrassed to ask," he reports. The Essex love of all things Anglo-Saxon means that the dish will now be described as "salmon marinated in…". Much clearer.
Wait till he "buys" a round for all his mates
A pensioner who has frequented a pub for the past 60 years has been rewarded for his loyalty with free beer for the rest of his life. Dennis Forth, who has just turned 75, started drinking in the Red Hart pub, in the village of Three Holes, Cambridgeshire, when he was 15. Manager Peter Phillips said that Forth thought the pub's gift was "fantastic". It will save the pensioner, who enjoys three pints of Elgood's Old Smoothie a night, £6 on each visit.
You can't have your whale and eat it
New evidence reaches us of the convoluted logic some special-interest groups will use to justify an untenable position. It seems the Japanese Whaling Association has adopted the slogan: "Save them! Eat them!" Quite how the process of turning living creatures into the new-fangled whale burgers will improve their chances of avoiding extinction is a mystery our Western minds may never fully understand. The Americans may get the idea, though. After all, during the Vietnam war, to prevent a particular settlement falling into Viet Cong hands, they torched it and explained: "In order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it."
One squaddie got trampled by a wild mousse
Like all true professionals, caterers are sometimes prone to over-emphasising their own importance in the larger scheme of things. On the sand dunes of Oman, supplier 3663 delivered food to about 23,000 armed personnel during a huge military exercise called Saif Sareea (swift-sword) II last year. Its aim, the Ministry of Defence tells us, was to "deploy, sustain and exercise a medium-scale warfighting joint task force". Yet, in a press release, the food supplier insists on calling the manoeuvres a "dessert" operation. Yes, we know Prime Minister Tony Blair was very complimentary about the strawberry ice-cream when he visited the well-fed troops, but didn't the "dessert" operation have something to do with guns, tanks and global terrorism?
What's up, mac?Never seen a hot dog before?
One of our eagle-eyed (and musically inclined) associates spotted a picture on the Web site of world-renowned Dobro guitar player Jerry Douglas (www.jerrydouglas.com). It showed two small dogs with make-believe buns strapped to their sides and fake ketchup and mustard "squirted" on their backs. The poached pooches didn't seem overly enamoured of their unusual overcoats but we couldn't help thinking that, while the ketchup could attract a few flies, the mustard should keep the fleas at bay.
