Dining Out Digest: Tacos, Brunch, and My Favourite Italian Restaurant in the UK

It is time for me to catch you up on some further recent eating.

Hello my friends, Romans, countrythems. It is time for me to catch you up on some further recent eating. I went to The Sea, The Sea and was quite mental about it, as you may already know, and now I also bring news of some other bits and bobs worth your time: tacos at my Peckham old faithful Taquiza, very fancy brunch that might be good for your birthday or payday or any other “fuck it”-type occasions at 45 Jermyn St., and, on balance, probably my favourite Italian restaurant in the whole of the UK (that one you’ll have to read more for; spoiler alert it isn’t in London). I don’t really have much else for you in the way of pre-amble so I’m just going to get into it. Also I should say that normal timings for my newsletters (Sundays for free post, Tuesdays for the paid recaps) will resume from this weekend, because I know you were all losing sleep over it.

45 Jermyn Street

I’m going to start with brunch because honestly my little sojourn at 45 Jermyn Street, wherein I tried their brand! new! brunch menu!, made me feel very glamorous indeed (or as glamorous as one can be when one has the SSRI sweats), which is a way I love to feel.

I was late for this lunch because I was - say it with me - “getting a pedicure which cost way too much 20 minutes away”, and I was also wearing leather mules. This meant that after my trotters had been generously moisturised post-treatment, I was sliding all around the place and fighting for my life in my own shoes (it be your own shoes), and so my walk across central London to the restaurant took double the amount of time that it should have. This is way too much information about my feet, but whatever, I’m world-building.

Anyway, while it is obviously poor form to be late for stuff, I am actually very glad that I was on this occasion. This is because as soon as I sat down on a very comfy banquette, opposite the sweeping 45 Jermyn St. bar, there was already in front of me a little silver dish brimming with mini potato rostis, cream cheese and caviar.

I hope that from reading Dining Out you will be aware that I am the opposite of a snob (the whole garlic bread thing, the fondness for chicken nuggets), and so when I say this it’s not because I have forgotten myself, it’s just because I love things that taste good, BUT: I really, really like caviar. I think “caviar bump” culture is heinous, obviously, because I do not work in Canary Wharf, but the thing about caviar as a food rather than a status symbol is that it is just plainly delicious - the saltiness, the richness, the texture, ugh. Posh people did really go crazy with some of their Things - cake forks, springer spaniels, Phoebe Waller-Bridge - and caviar is one of those bangers. So when it is offered to me, particularly on a crunchy little cube of potato, I am saying “yes the fuck please,” and trying to calculate in real time how much I can eat without seeming rude.