LIFE
ing brown puddle from which nothing
interesting will rise, beyond possibly
an audit. They should have looked
for a piece of Roman London to ruin.
There is plenty about, if you look. The
Temple of Mithras is in the basement
at Bloomberg, like a Balrog in reverse;
that is, the ancient evil was, in this case,
upstairs on the executive floor.
So I was hoping for Caesars Pal-
ace in Las Vegas, or a scene from Mel
Brooks’s History of the World Part
1. (‘See — Hitler on Ice!’). I sought
something vivid; something vicious;
somewhere to hide. Instead, at the bot-
tom of a staircase, brown-and-white
tiles sit by a grey, despairing carpet; it
is the carpet from The Office; the car-
pet from a thousand offices, in fact, all
sinking into London clay with shame.
Halfway up a handsome man asks
for our reservation: an expensive res-
taurant, then, with a man on the stairs
for guidance, as if we were all blind.
Inside, it is half-decorated with busts
and drawings of Roman buildings; it
is a half-wrapped Roman gift from
Paperchase. The booths are yellow
velvet; the curtains are grey gauze;R
oma sells ancient-Roman-style
food near Fenchurch Street
station at the east end of the
City, near Aldgate. It is, therefore, a
themed restaurant in a conventional,
ebbing financial district, a cursed place
in need of Windolene; and this is some-
thing to applaud, at least theoretically,
because it is ambitious. Who remem-
bers ambition, which is more inter-
esting than greed? The last themed
restaurant to open in these parts was
Fable, a repulsive fake library and
fusion destination for lawyers on Hol-
born Viaduct which I hope has burnt
down, or at least been sued for copy-
right infringement by makers of fairy
tales everywhere. It was as magical as
date rape, and the fairies fled.
A Roman-themed restaurant could
work here now, if you want to eat met-
aphor; the parallels are thick and easy.
The Romans built an empire, then lost
it because they were forgetful and cor-
rupt, and they slunk out of history and
into tourism. Roma, however, seems
to lack the vigour — the blood — of
those it wants to honour with its vam-
pire food, which includes salami. It
lives inside a modernist horror: a shin-
the windows, ludicrously, are picture
windows, like the ones in the Green
Park Kosher Hotel in Bournemouth,
which is closed, so I cannot review it,
although my grandparents were fond
of it. (I never understood why — they
were not kosher at home — but the
mystery died with them.)
So Roma does not grope even for
pastiche, which is disappointing; I sus-
pect it is less like ancient Rome than
Stringfellows, the chip-and-tit bar for
inadequates to the west; I suspect, too,
that City boys would not want to eat
ancient Roman food in a lounge bar
without naked women and snakes.
Roma is one month old and if it
should have a Pantheon in cheese as
a centrepiece, or a lion eating a Chris-
tian in pastry, it forgot to do it. Only
five tables are filled, including ours,
so it seethes with the anxiety of the
unloved. This is distressing, because
the food, for the City, is good and
made with care; Roma deserves to live.
(My last City review, of a Marco Pierre
White body part, was a self-penned
obituary.)
We eat salami, good bread, spicy
bruschetta, hare and pistachio terrine,
lamb rump, crispy pork belly.
I have no idea if this is what Mar-
cus Claudius Marcellus and Postumus
Agrippa ate, but I cannot imagine
them eating it here, behind the Green
Park Kosher Hotel’s picture windows,
even if the menu does have a section
called ‘cooked in hay’.
It is, then, an almost parochial
ancient Rome, a genuinely dated
ancient Rome, and that makes it
almost charming.Roma, New London Street, London
EC3R 7NA, tel: 020 7488 2807.Food
No place like Rome
Tanya Gold
They should
have looked
for a bit
of Roman
London
to ruin. There
is plenty aboutI’m very glad I followed a friend’s
recommendation to read The Bird
of Dawning by John Masefield, an
author neglected to the point of
disparagement.
The vehicle of the book is a
tale of seafaring in the 1860s,
and one of Masefield’s great
strengths is vividness. He deals
with material objects in motion.
But description of such objects is
impossible for any writer. If the
reader has never seen an oak tree,
no amount of description will
conjure it up.
A simple example in The Bird
of Dawning (the title is the name
of a ship) comes when the heroremembers to take with him from
a sinking ship a vice ‘nipped to
a ledge; he released the nip and
took that’. Without the technical
term nip, the description is less
exact and economical.
A landlubber like me gets
into trouble when things happen
to a ship’s masts and rigging.
Don’t worry, I do not intend
to catalogue the names of sails
and ropes and spars. Masefield
spends two pages describing thesetting of a lower studding-sail
by a depleted crew. (He sensibly
enough spells studding-sail
‘stunsail’, which is how it is said.)
On first reading I got the general
idea. I returned later to work out
how the stunsail is set, on one side
of the foresail (the main lower
sail on the foremost of the three
masts).
I got into a bit of a tangle in
Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book, with
tripping-lines and booms, guys
and lizards, and I’m still not sure
what secures the lower boom to
the side of the ship. But I can’t see
how it could be conveyed at all
without technical terms.Another irreducible term is
straik (as Masefield spells it),
a line of planking in the hull of a
boat. If a straik in an open boat
leaks, the people in it may perish.
Masefield thinks straik derives
from streak. The OED derives
it from Old English streccan,
‘stretch’, but admits that from the
16th century strake and streak
are hopelessly confused. Its one
illustrative quotation for the
verb strake, ‘to become streaky’,
is from Masefield himself: ‘The
peacock screamed, the clouds
were straking, / My cut cheek felt
the weather breaking.’
— Dot WordsworthMIND YOUR LANGUAGE
Straik‘Are you vying for the Ukip leadership?’