TOM JACKSON, POLLY HANCOCK60 The Times Magazine
coffee and waffles with cured pork products and
sugar syrup if it’s what you think God put you
on earth to do, but please, just call it Sam’s or
Bertha’s or the Westbourne Grove Diner. And if
it feels like Sunday in Brooklyn in there – which
it isn’t going to, because it’ll be full of monoglot
Russian wives in Moschino gymwear googling
English boarding schools and whatsapping
their Pilates instructors, as opposed to hipsters,
Hasids and penurious poets – then let people
decide that for themselves.
Not that the gormless luxury shoppers and
premium tourists rammed into the place when
I showed up looked like they knew or cared
where they were. They just lolled over their
phones in designer baseball caps and couture
cosies, mostly keeping their coats on and
making the place feel like an airport café,
flicking at the social media feeds of people
in more interesting places than they were,
which is everywhere.
The booking website had put me on a
communal table so I asked if I could please
swap to a private one, as I was meeting my
mother, whose years of sitting up at a counter
with massive headphones on, watching TikTok
videos on her laptop while slurping “herbal
bone broth” were now, sadly, behind her.
The unsmiling young woman made some
sort of Baltic gesture of acquiescence (no one
working here was from or had ever been to
Brooklyn, though I believe the “concept”
itself is a rollout from an original there)
and I sat myself down at the little, round,
marble-topped PizzaExpress table indicated.
Weird place to meet one’s mum, youEating out Giles Coren
hank you for calling Sunday in
Brooklyn,” said a recorded voice
at the other end of the London
telephone number I had just dialled,
delighting me with the notion
that my call had travelled not only
3,500 miles across the planet but
also several days forward in time.
Or possibly backward. For he didn’t specify
which Sunday, in Brooklyn, I had called. If
it was the previous Sunday I had got through
to, I thought, then my call to say that I was
going to be ten minutes late would look a little
hysterical, coming, as it would appear to him
to be doing, fully five days before my lunch.
And if it was next Sunday I was talking to,
well, then I’m awfully sorry I was a no-show
the other day but, since you’re on the line,
could you look up who won the 2.45 at
Lingfield tomorrow?
Sunday in Brooklyn indeed. What sort
of a name for a restaurant is that? Makes
me think of that smug tool in the Easy (Like
Sunday Morning) cashpoint advert from the
1980s, with his footballer’s gait, hungry cat and
horrid empty warehouse flat. Or the vacuous,
high-pitched imbecility of Friends.
I hate restaurants with “interesting” names.
They’re like people with interesting names:
never as interesting as their names. I mean,
open a brunch place if you must, serve weak‘T
‘The staff are clever and
cultured, the clientele noisy
and Jewish and the food
very good. It’s an Arcadian
idyll in the shadow of the
screeching capital’
Sam’s Cafe et al