Much like George Orwell’s ‘Moon under the water’ there exists in my mind, the perfect fish and chip experience. In this imagined eatery the chips are served just to my liking (not straight out of the fryer but ‘rested’ like the Sunday joint), the fish is – forgive me – cod, and its batter shatters like glass at the application of the knife, the mushy peas must be neon in colour and the consistency of baby food. Finally the whole ensemble must be eased down the oesophagus with many a cup of strong tea.

Four months previously in mid October…

We’d gone to Suffolk for a short break before I took up the editorship of Lovefood.com. It’s an area I know and love, a shade over two hours from North London, and far enough to escape the capital’s gravitational pull. After a lovely weekend on our final day – a Monday take note – we had a mooch around Snape Maltings and headed into Aldeburgh for a nose round the bookshops culminating in a plan to finish with fish and chips on the seafront.

We pulled into Aldeburgh just after 12:30, and noting the short queue at the Golden Galleon and thought, ‘we’ll come back in a bit’. Somewhere along that long high street time and space stretched so that by the time I looked at my watch, it was 2:05pm. The chippy closed at 2pm. A frantic 200m dash pushing a buggy ended in the ignominy of the ‘closed’ sign. Inside the scrub down was taking place, and as someone who once worked in a chip shop for a summer in his youth, I knew my cause was lost. There then followed a sprint around Aldeburgh to see if anywhere was still serving fish and chips, they weren’t.

My lovely wife, trying to make a bad situation good, popped into Lawson’s deli and bought typical deli fayre. Thus I was to be found, sat on a seafront bench in a cold October, eating cold stuffed vine leaves amongst other things instead of having my face warmed by the hot saline steam of a bag of chips. Food does have a time and a place, a terroir if you must, and the food of the out-of-season seaside town in Britain is fish and chips. I’m fully prepared to admit that what followed was a petulant ‘food sulk’ of epic proportions.

The here and now…

7am, Monday 20th February, and I’m all ready talking about ‘operation Aldeburgh’. This time there will be no mistakes, no shopping trips, no tarrying in bookshops. The ‘mission’ will not ‘creep’, there is but one objective. We pull up in Aldeburgh at 9:45am, in February it’s even colder than October and the town is snell. The municipal pond is covered with a film of ice, and the wind would I’m sure do the same to your eyeballs if you looked out to sea long enough. We explore the town tentatively: charity shops, coffee shop, bookshops, off licence, but I’m donstantly checking the time on my phone every 10minutes, but I’m worried.

The Golden Galleon

Like nearly every restaurant and eatery these days there are so many mixed reviews online for the Golden Galleon as to make imagining any experience there meaningless. The decision is whether to get a take away and go for the bench on the beach option, or to eat in the small 20ish cover restaurant above the chippy. There’s an added complication, a sign on the door reads ‘no children under 3, no pushchairs’, my daughter’s two and a half. Indeed this rule has caused much chagrin, with complaints vented online. Rules, my mother-in-law is apt to say, are for ‘little people’, so we press on. To be fare though I can see why the do it. The upstairs restaurant is tiny, and accessed by a narrow staircase, if the parents of little Oscar tried to get his 4×4 bugaboo in there, they’d have to take out a table. The loos are too small to fit any baby changing facilities, consequently the place just isn’t set up for babies.

Having locked the pushchair to the lamppost outside, we head upstairs. What follows is as closed to my ideal fish and chip experience as it’s possible to get. Firstly we’re welcomed with a big hello – how are you? From the nice lady running the room. She follows this up with ‘I’ve got a couple of cushions if your daughter would like to be a bit higher’. The lady – I never did ask her name – and I chat some more, she’s warmed-hearted and pleasant, with that sort of ephemeral affability that only comes from years – nine she tells me – experience on the job. We order, and the food arrives promptly; well cooked and well rested but not soggy chips, a big chunk of cod with ‘shatter batter’, lurid green peas, and tea. I fall upon it like a wolf on the fold.

Clearly some people have found issue with the Golden Galleon, and its sister restaurant, but then some people find issue with Le Gavroche. Your experience may vary as people are apt to say. But as someone who knows a well-done, beef-dripping-fried-chip when he eats one, these were great. The fish was also grand; light, crunchy batter and large juicy flakes of white flesh. Indeed the whole experience was a triumph, so much so I passed on their puddings, purely so I could enjoy the taste for the rest of the afternoon whenever I burped or hiccupped

Ah Valentine’s Day, possibly the most unromantic day of the year, a notion I wrote about on lovefood.com. But if you’re looking for romance (with the stress placed on the second syllable) than look no further than Babs’ The Romance of Food’. I’m not the first to blog about this tome of love, or be stunned by it’s recipes, and gobsmacked by Babs’ descriptions, bon mots, and tales. 

Ready for a surprise?
However, for me, one recipe stands out like a society debutant at the first ball of the London season, and that is ‘chicken with orange surprise’. I’m not quite sure what the ‘surprise’ is, as I don’t think you could get much more orange on that plate. Perhaps it’s ‘wow, this orange tastes of chicken!’
 

And you’ve got to love a recipe that includes bleach as an ingredient: to prepare wishbones, scrap all the meat from them then soak and wash in a mild bleach solution. Following this we get a potted history of oranges, and Barbara’s daily vitamin intake. 

In my heart of hearts though (and it is the day of love) I love books like this. Did Barbara ever set out to make the most kitsch cookery book on the planet?  Probably not, but she did. I wonder which of today’s rather soft-focus anodyne tomes will provoke a reaction in 20 years. 

A look at the presenters of food programming so far for the fag end of 2011 and 2012 reveals nothing but white chaps with names like Henry, George, and Tim. All good eggs no doubt, and let me say for a moment I don’t blame these fellas for the dire state of plurality in food programming – after all we need chaps to mess about in milk floats and indulge in sibling rivalry. But hell’s teeth we need something on the other end of the seesaw surely?  Most ‘food telly’ at the moment makes want eat badly prepared fugu and end it all rather than watch ‘Mumford & Sons do food’ nonsense. 

Where are the women, the documentaries, the experts, the intelligence, the other voices. Liam Tucker perhaps said best in his review of ‘Hugh’s Hungry Boys’ on TV Pixie.com

“The format of these shows is so predictably formulaic it's impossible to form an opinion on them. You've been so ruthlessly whacked with the hammer of this sort of gubbins, so, so many times that even responding is beyond you. You've been whacked senseless, and Channel 4 hope you'll put up with it because you've given up all hope.”

The D word

Any comment about diversity can often be misconstrued by the ignorant to look like I’m asking for blind lesbians in wheelchairs making cupcakes – I’m not. I just want a few more ages, backgrounds, accents and races to tell me interesting things about food.

Or maybe it’s the misguided belief that it’s women who are into cooking and lifestyle shows, and therefore posh chaps that are the best people to front them? The Good Food Channel are doing some interesting things with the Roux Legacy, Annabel Langbein and Ching's Kitchen. Meanwhile a look at non-repeat food programming across terrestrial TV at the moment (Masterchef, Heston, Baker Bros, Hugh’s Boys, Raymond Blanc) reveals Katy Ashworth from ‘I can cook’ on Cbeebies as the only woman doing any cooking on the box. And that folks, is a bloody disgrace.

Now Simon Cowell – having reduced the music to the very depths of vapidity – is turning his eye to food. And when it couldn’t get any worse, Laura Zilli is coming, apparently to BBC Two, dispensing such sage food advice as:

Each recipe will tell you exactly when you can leave the pans bubbling and slip off to do your make-up and change into your glamorous clothes, right down to which outfit to wear for each meal.’

 Pass the fugu, for surely we have reached the end of days. Read Luke MacKay’s excellent thoughts on this fashion/food TV first.

The thing is

I know from my readership of lovefood that people are crying out for something a bit more interesting and thought provoking that all this malarkey. Where is the Sherlock of Food, the David Attenborough of Food? Where are the docs, the dramas? Food telly is in danger of being fast food telly, and is heading towards being utterly shit for 2012. Enough with ‘lifestyle’ and faux jeopardy, there are better stories to tell, call me.

Much of my time then is spent managing a team of freelancers. So I’ve written this post because I got tired of explaining to people individually how to best structure their work so I commission them again. But more than that it serves as a broad guide to how to write for the web. So even if you’re specialism is football, philately or fashion, it’s a case of same meat, different gravy. 

I’m not really that interested in your words

Most writers – most of whom have a background in print journalism – recoil in horror when I tell them this, for them the craft of verbage is why they do the job. It’s why I wrote my book too, and pieces for Delicious and Waitrose Kitchen. To me words are like Lego, to be clipped together to make giant elegant structures. 

However this isn’t always the case for writing for the web. A better analogy would be that words are like cement, because they glue and hold other things together. Here then, is Webb’s golden rule…

Writing for Lovefood is about having a good idea, then gathering assets from around the internet to prove that idea, and sticking them together with words.

Writers do all this research on the net, then try and obfuscate that so it looks as if they know it all ready. When in actual fact, much like a maths exam (which I failed) you get points for showing your working out. People don’t just want the answer, they want to see how you got the answer. 

The ‘story’ in effect comes from these sources. So don’t just mention Mrs Beeton, don’t even just link to wikipedia's page on Mrs Beeton, go on Google books and clip out the very page that mentions the think you’re talking about for Mrs Beeton. Sauce for calf's head anyone?

All of the following can enrich articles. Tweets, Flickr images, YouTube videos, Google books, Audio Boos

Compare this piece from the early days of Lovefood, to this from a few weeks ago. One looks like a page from the Bible, the other is content for web. In the following list you can see that the actual writing forms just one task in getting an article on a website live. 

1. Write feature
2. Make sure that there are at least three link outs to internal/external articles
3. Make sure that the URL is SEO friendly
4. Check title is SEO-able
5. Add images and video
6. Add alt text to images
7. Tweet it
8. Facebook it
9. Reply to any comments/tweets

Badly formatted, un-illustrated, linkless copy with a non-seo friendly title and first paragraph waffling on about something else before getting to the point means I’ll never commission you again. By the time I've fixed all that and put it into the CMS I could have written the actual few 100 words myself. 

Naturally being a rule there are exceptions to this. If the piece is very personal, where story comes directly from your experience, you can draw the user in. But for a guide to cheese, we don’t care – just the facts ma’am. 

How to pitch 

Firstly know your subject. The lovely Katy Salter when at Waitrose Food Illustrated gave this interview to the Press Gazette in 2007, and it’s as true now as it is then. 

Don’t pitch a subject you don’t know anything about.

Food writing seems to attract a certain type of ‘gal’ and ‘chap’ – slightly posh, a touch horsey, with bright eyes, good teeth and shiny hair. They are perhaps not the best of people to write an in-depth piece on the history of halal. Good food writers who can write for the web are rare indeed. Like Katy above many is the time that I’ve been pitched ‘Tuscany on a plate’ stories. 

Cliches

A lot of food writing is lazy ‘what I had for dinner’ and it winds me up. Ingredints are toothsome and unctuous, with the ‘flavours of X cutting through the attribute Y of ingredient Z’ I’m not interested in food writing, but journalism about food. There is a difference. 

Golly, the lovely Bee Wilson (who's book Swindled is a great read btw) has very kindly named Food Britannia The Sunday Times' food book of the year, and what a year it was for interesting foodie books. Other contenders included some big tomes from the big names like Jamie's Great Britain, Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets and Bill's Everyday Asian.

But there were also some other first time authors like me, Kerstin Rodgers' fab Supper Club, Hawksmoor at home, but Will, Huw and Richard and Lucas Hollweg's 'Good things to Eat' to name but three. 

In the FT too

If that wasn't enough plaudits, food writer (and cafe owner) Tim Haywood named checked Food Britannia in his 2011 culinary round-up in The Financial Times. He said ‘like a gluttonous contemporary William Cobbett, Webb has toured the country talking to food producers old and new. More than a good read, this may well turn out to be an important historical snapshot of the British food scene at the end of a significant decade' 

His other choices included another first time author, Signe Johansen and her lovely Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking, and the utterly brilliant Testicles: Balls in Cooking and Culture. 

What I think all of the above shows, is that while big glossy cookery books by famous and long established chefs will always be with us; there are new voices, and more importantly new styles of book, breaking through.

People will always want recipes, and books will provide them (but for how long?). But today I think they also want context, and history, and descriptions and substance. I like to think that Food Britannia provides that, because it sure as hell doesn’t provide any recipes!

Anyway, Bee and Tim – both of whom I know professionally but that is all – know what they’re talking about, so why not buy a copy of my book, and see what all the fuss is about. Thanks. 

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.  Arnold Toynbee

Just a quick one to let you know that on the 19th of October I 'got the keys' to Lovefood.com. Which as the apt URL suggests, is a website for people who love food. There’s a mix of recipes from chefs, cooks and  TV people, a guide to producers and suppliers, articles exploring various subjects, and finally opinion pieces debating current food issues. 

The site is only a year old, and has grown a loyal audience in that time. Please take a moment to register. But now it’s time to make it bigger, better, and more beautiful – so watch this space. 

Well if my experience the other night is anything to go by, they've not only kept it up, but rock solid for 15 long months, and over a year is a long time in this business. Indeed were I a younger man looking for a blogging angle to my restaurant reviewing, a 'one year later' review would be a good choice. Imagine going to a place when the media circus has moved on and normal folk have moved in, when the founding chef has burned too bright, or when the original owner can't secure any more financing and has cut corners. Thankfully Trullo seems to have avoided all these industry pitfalls and just bedded in nicely, the place is always booked and tables are turned after two hours. 

Being a 'family man' when my wife and I do arrange Grandma to babysit and do go out all I'm after is a good time and something nice to eat. Trullo delivered that in spades. The cooking is my sort of food, interesting, simple, well done. The decor and staff friendly and the whole experience a delight. It is that rare thing then, a great neighbour restaurant doing good food at reasonable prices. You can't help but love it. 

We had

Campri & soda and a glass of prosecco 

Pumpkin fritti with parmesan dip, and ox heart with beans and salsa verde

Tagliatelle with Scottish girolles to share (waiter remembered this from the order and brought two plates

Red legged partridge with bone marrow and lentils, and mackerel with beetroot and a green salad.

two glasses of red and a glass of white

the cheese selection and a dessert wine, peppermint tea

All that, for just over a £100

The rest of the street was made up of Paperchase, a few pubs, cafes, banks, and more recently eateries like Pret, Eat, Itsu. However of late new additions have come to TCR, on this one street alone there are now six mini supermarkets.

In July 2011 the 20th branch of Little Waitrose was the latest addition, offering, as you'd expect, a smaller retail experience than it's parent store. As the blurb on the window reads, it offers "Food all day, every day, lunch made easy, ingredients and ideas for later and everyday items.

A bit further along is M&S simple food, which sells a lot more than just food. It offers lunchtime items like sandwiches and salads, but also has other 'office' staples like leaving and birthday cards, flowers, cake and chocolates. There's also a clothes section, selling underwear for those who well, need to buy pants and socks in their lunch hour. Not only can you buy lunch here, there's a tiny seating area, allowing you to eat here too. They also sell their Percy Pigs

Then a bit further down, just off TCR on Goodge street is a Tesco Metro, This medium sized store offers similar product lines to Waitrose, namely lunch, and things you might need later for dinner. It's 

Diagonally opposite Goodge Street is store street, which is home to the Co-Op's Food store, again lunch and dinner offerings are very much on display. The Co-op, despite have great credentials and a strap line of 'good with food' never quite comes up with the goods I find. Everything always looks a little, well, desultry  

Then further towards Warren Street at the end of TCR sits a Tesco Express with a whole wall of sandwiches.

…and opposite that is a largish Sainsbury's local, probably the shop with the most sq ft out of all of the above. 

All of these are on a street that is around a kilometre long. And all do a very brisk trade at lunchtime. For many in these 'watching the pennies' days a sandwich from here is often a couple of pounds cheaper than one from Eat, Pret, Boots, and many of the other lunchtime places. The difference is is that – particularly in the case of Little Waitrose – they're taking the opportunity to sell you your dinner too. The area is saturated with office works, and most offices these days have a fridge. If the one in my office is anything to go by it's stuffed with people's shopping. 

We often hear about supermarkets destroying the livelihoods of small shops. But here they're going after the other chains for the cut-throat 20min 'grab some lunch and head back to the desk' business. They all offer 'meal deals' where a butty, drink and a bag of crisps can be had for a few quid. (I'll discuss the healthiness of this another time) Furthermore they nearly all sell sushi, noodles, and salads, which is competing with the likes of Itsu too. The sainsbury's and M&S even have a hot food counter, offering baked potatoes, curries, pastries, toasties etc. About the only place they don't yet compete in effectively is freshly made coffee. But that might change.

In a way many people adopt a consumer version of the 'just-in-time' manufacturing system to their food shopping habits these days. People seem to be buying only what's needed for that evening. I see this more and more, especially with younger people without children. Monday evening at the Tesco Metro near me the place is heaving. The weekend is for socialising not shopping it seems.We live in the lastminute.com age, where friends come for dinner at the drop of a hat. Recently a friend and I were reminising about the neighbourly act of asking 'can I borrow a cup of sugar?' such a question today's 7-11 world where we can get anything pretty much anytime, would seem odd. Anyway, I digress. 

My point is this, were I the owners of Itsu, or even Pret, I'd be trialing, Itsu@home or Pret@home sharpish. Itsu for example, could offer stir fry noodle kits that you just chuck in a wok later on. I'd also discount the lunch and dinner purchases if you bought both at the same time, again to incentivise customer loyalty. Pret, Eat and the other shops sell hot food, Eat does pies for example. What about offering them cold, so that people can just re-heat at home in the mircowave with a bag of steamable veg. 

I'll end with a quote from Morgan Spurlock about the fast food industry, 'their not bad men, they're business men' The supermarket's key attribute is convenience. They're like water, offering us the path of least resistance to our wallets and stomachs that is acceptable. Other businesses and chains have to try and match that ambition and vision, or the supermarkets will do to them what they've done to the butchers, the bakers and the greengrocers. 

As a food journalist I own a lot of books about food. What often surprises people, however, is that I don’t own too many cookery books. Recently on this blog Dan Lepard asked what we wanted from such instructional tomes, the gist being we seem to want lifestyle, not recipes.

Read more at BBC Food

Of course one of the jewels in my collection is Dick Emery's legendary tome.