I once ate seven bowls of ragù bolognese over the course of a single weekend. I was in Bologna, to be fair, and on a mission – to get to the bottom of spag bol (yes, I know it should be served with tagliatelle). A few years earlier, I did something similar with a Polish stew called bigos (a sort of hunter’s stew). I wanted to learn about its variations, its nuances, and I wondered what you could find out about a place if you dived into one dish in particular. In the case of bigos, I gleaned that the Polish are prepared to wait a long time for things to be done.
My friend Tom suffers from a similar obsession (just last month he dropped a dozen scotch eggs on a bank holiday Monday) and so when he said he was heading to Paris to eat multiple steak frites, I wasn’t exactly surprised. He wasn’t just going for a laugh, mind you: Tom runs a pub in London called the Carlton Tavern, and had come to the opinion that his steak and chips could do with a bit of zhooshing up. Hence the recce in Paris. But a man travelling all that way to examine meat and potatoes cannot do so alone, so I volunteered my services.
