I lived in a tiny village outside Oxford for a year and bandmate-to-be Chris had made friends with our Scottish neighbours, Syd and Ann. They were a little older than us and had invited us for lunch one Sunday. Syd and Ann’s traditional English Sunday lunch of roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding and vegetables was the first truly memorable meal of my life. There was nothing special about the food itself, but it was just so well cooked! Living at home with my parents, I was used to something completely different. On a Sunday, vegetables were boiled until they turned to jelly, and the beef shrank to a dry, woody lump while we were at the pub on the corner of our street having a lunchtime pint. The beef usually came out of the oven about half its original size. Like magic! Syd and Ann’s perfectly cooked roast beef lunch exploded in my mouth with flavours and textures I had never experienced.
Many years later, Ingre and I were taken to dinner in London at the Japanese restaurant Benihana by my brother Brian. Their advertising blurb goes “not just a meal, it’s an experience”. It’s true, it was an experience, and we had a very good evening out. The food was great, but there was also all the dicking around and juggling with knives and other kitchen utensils by the cook which was fun to see and made it special. It was also my first experience of Japanese food. Then I had another great Japanese restaurant experience in Stavanger, Norway of all places. I was on stand duty with some colleagues at an exhibition and we went Japanese for dinner. The Kobe beef and sashimi were something else!
In the early 90s, driving north from Newcastle for a camping trip in Scotland, Ingre and I stopped off at an Indian restaurant just outside Edinburgh. About the restaurant itself I remember almost nothing, but the food and especially the naan bread
was superb. That meal most likely contributed to us being able to tolerate the rain, which fell every day for the two weeks we drifted around in Scotland and the north of England. Why we didn’t even think of checking into a B&B is a mystery and we stubbornly pitched a wet tent every day.
Just to balance things a little, I ate an outstandingly disgusting meal in Shanghai on one trip to China. That popular restaurant served every part of a cow that you could possibly wish for. Knees? Eyes? Nose? Stomach? No problem at all! And the menu had pictures of everything, in case you didn’t know what a cow knee looked like. “And how would you like your cow spleen, sir? Medium rare?” It was a pity that all the food, like the restaurant itself, smelled like the silt on the bottom of a stagnant pool of rat-infested water. Or a rotting carcass. The spirit they served tasted even worse than the food, but it completely numbed my taste buds and, in the end, made eating possible. It also made my young colleague drunk.
When we lived in France, our favourite restaurant in Bourges was Vietnamese – not French – and we staggered home from there on a regular basis after a good meal, a bottle of wine and the free saki, which we were always given after we paid the bill. The saki cups had tiny pictures of naked men and women in the bottom, which we found inspiring.
The Cypress Tree, a song from the 1985 First Cab album “Little Pieces”, is about a fictitious Japanese restaurant and written before I’d ever visited one. It’s also the only song from the album that I still get a tiny royalty from every year (which is shared with two publishing companies and the rest of the band). Someone, somewhere is still playing that song every year on the radio. Sadly, the album is not available anywhere, though I have a spare vinyl copy if someone wants to make me an offer I can’t refuse… No, just kidding. Wild horses couldn’t make me part with it. I’d love to put the album out on streaming sites and we’ve talked about it, but unfortunately, I don’t own the rights.