Mm, Chicken Nuggets by B. Wilson.

In 2001, London was still the largest city in the world.

It had a population of six and a half million, two million more than New York, and five million more than Tokyo.

One of the biggest wonders of this glorious metropolis, as well as one of the most strangely human sites that the world can show, according to J.C. Woolen, was the spectacle of all these millions of people being fed.

On any given day, Woolen wrote, there are nearly a million people lunching in restaurants

within a few miles of the strand. In the evenings, thousands dined in swanky West End restaurants,

where a meal with wine might cost an average of a sovereign. But as Wollon noted, far more Londoners live each day, and live not

at all badly either, on a single shilling each. These Londoners visited sausage and porkhouses,

tea rooms, pie and eel shops, and vegetarian restaurants, refreshment rooms and taverns,

cook shops in Hackney that sold hot peas pudding

and fried fish shops in Clarkinwell,

where you could buy fish and tatters for a couple of pennies.

The spectacle of eating out in London in in 2019, is still a strangely human sight.

Sometimes I find myself at the station on my way home, trying to decide between a vegetarian

burrito with extra guacamole at Benito's hat, or a box of Moroccan meatballs at Leon. And I think about how many other

people across the city are choosing the same thing at that exact moment, weighing the cost against the

carbs, deciding on something cold and easy versus something hot and filling, feeling guilty about eating meat, or wondering

whether a meal deal is a con. All these businesses are trying to find ways to make more money

from our culinary desires, to persuade us to pay more for less. Take chicken katsu curry.

This was inspired by the fried katsu dishes of Japan and offers British eaters the gloopy comfort of school dinners, doled up as a piece of Eastern Exotica.

The meat is breadcrumbed and fried and served in a thick, sweetish sauce, heavy on the curry

powder.

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