A LONG AND MESSY UPDATE
A Long and Messy Business reached its crowding target - although people can still pledge - in December. I have been working hard and will be sending the text to the publishers very soon. There is a great deal of work to do on design and layout before it can go to the printers. When the book is published not only will you be posted your own copy but it is then that all the promises we made will be redeemed. I can only thank you for your patience.
I might have finished it sooner if other matters, mostly the business of restaurant consultancy, did not drag me from my desk. Currently I am working with the restaurant in the Design Museum, PARABOLA. While it operates as a café and restaurant for locals and Museum goers by day, I am ‘curating’ the restaurant’s activities in the evening, both by producing menus (and teaching the chefs how to cook them) and producing a programme of special events at regular intervals.
The menus change weekly or fortnightly or somewhere in between. They usually have three little snacks (Broad bean bruschetta, white asparagus with speck and parmesan and raw tuna and ginger dressing on the current menu), a first course, usually pasta or fish and then a main (chicken with morels, spinach and wild garlic timbale at the moment), and then cheese or pudding or both. At between £35.00 and £45.00 the menus are both extremely seasonal and very good value.
The next menu, hyperbolically entitled LIFE IN THE WILD: GAME, FISH AND FORAGED features morels and mousserons, nettles and ramsons, zander, rabbit and wild strawberries. It has some of the recipes in the book. Starting next Monday, it will run for three weeks and it would be very nice to see you there. So nice, in fact, that I have secured exclusively for you generous pledgers an equally generous discount from the owners (Peter Prescott and Terence Conran) of 50% off all food in that period. To take advantage of this offer, simply book online at http://www.parabola.london/reserve/ or telephone 0207 940 8795 saying you are a Long and Messy pledger: please remember to use the name with which you pledged.
At the moment we are running the last two nights of a menu entitled A LONG AND MESSY APRIL – more recipes from the book – and on Friday and Saturday we have two nights of Indian food from Karan Ghokani which is also warmly recommended. Other events coming up include:
A number of evenings with tastings and dinners with Californian wine and winemakers to coincide with the new California exhibition at the Design Museum, including two nights of merriment with legendary wine merchant Willie Lebus and a farewell to Alastair Little who cooks at Parabola in June for a week prior to his departure for Sydney. We are also doing a cookbook series of Californian menus from the likes of Chez Panisse, Zuma Café and Gjelina and dinners with chefs, including Rick Stein, Jeremy Lee and Henry Harris.
Hope to see you soon.
Rowley