Early on during dinner at The Parakeet in Kentish Town, amid a swelling tide of wine-loosened voices, my wife glanced towards where our food would be coming from. “That looks,” she said, with visible concern, “like it might be a ridiculously intense kitchen to work in.”
Now, even setting aside the particular perspective afforded by her years of waitressing jobs — which is to say, she finds all open kitchens vaguely anxiety-inducing and if they gave out medals for service to provincial trattorias, she would be as laden with them as a minor royal at a coronation — it was hard to deny that she was onto something.
