I know now not to eat before a standup gig or TV show. Your brain’s not working as fast after you eat. I’m slower, more tired. It’s similar to how you feel post-coital, right? Postprandial and post-coital are very similar because, as far as your body is concerned, it’s mission accomplished for today. Nothing else needs to be achieved: you’ve eaten and you’ve procreated – you’re smashing this! Go to bed, you’ve earned it. Of course, as a comedian, that’s when the working day starts, but your body doesn’t know.
I’m a real high-low person. I love a Michelin-star tasting menu. I love a Zinger meal. I’m not elitist at all when it comes to food. I just love it all.
When I hit nine, 10 years old, I just became … “voracious” would be the word. In Malaysia, we’d go to coffee shops and I’d have a full dish of noodles as a starter, then a full plate of grilled meats as my second course. I was having double meals. And I got very, very fat, so from the age of 10 to maybe even 15, I was a big boy.
People talk about the human eye as proof of intelligent design. For me, it’s the prawn. There’s a lot wrong with the eye, the eye fucks up all the time: we have a blind spot; I’m wearing glasses. The eye sucks. The eye is proof that there is no God. But the prawn is a perfect curve of sea meat in a shell. You can eat it all. What other animal can you just take the skin off and put the whole thing in your mouth? It’s like it was designed for us to eat.
On a trip to China in 2019, we were in a food market and there was one stall with a guy selling critters on sticks. There were snakes and iguanas, and a lizard splayed like it was crucified. And there was a big old tarantula on a stick, I ate that. I ate a centipede on a stick. We went to a cockroach farm and I ate cockroaches. And I’d eat them all again before I eat baked salmon. I really would.
I can imagine being vegetarian. But vegan? I couldn’t live without eggs. An egg, like a prawn, comes in a perfect little package. It’s all edible. It’s all good for you. It can be sweet, it can be savoury. What else can be an omelette and a whiskey sour? Nothing! It’s a miracle food.
The British approach to food and alcohol is boom and bust. Like, you don’t drink anything in the week and then the weekend you drink so much you potentially commit a crime. And most of the week you eat very plain, gentle food, and on a Friday you eat a vindaloo and ruin your night.
I’ll get absolutely crucified for this, but I still don’t entirely get yorkshire puddings. It’s just bread in a bowl shape. Bread as a gravy cup.
I give British food a tough time for being bland, but I make an exception for puddings, which this country does very, very well. And banoffee pie is top of that list. It has the salty sweetness of the toffee, the airiness of the cream, and then that comforting banana taste without having a whole banana jammed down your throat (maybe I don’t know how to eat bananas). It’s got the ideal taste profile of British puddings without the heaviness of, say, sticky toffee pudding, which is also great, by the way.
I got very into wine in my late 20s and my most controversial wine opinion is that I don’t think wine gets any better past £30. You could draw a quality versus price line and it would start plateauing around 30, because after a certain point, you are not really paying for quality any more. You’re paying for prestige and rarity.
A lot of comedians are into food. It might be because we have a lot of free time and we travel, so we can get into food in a way that people with nine-to-fives probably have less time to do. And we’re hedonists really. Our work is based on pleasure and so we really appreciate pleasure and weare always chasing pleasure.
My favourite things
Food
One of my icebreaker questions with people is: “Rank your carbohydrates.” For me, it’s currently: noodles, rice, pasta, bread, potatoes. So if you want a sort of broad-stroke answer to that question, my favourite food is noodles.
Drink
It will probably be a wine at this point. The most underrated grape, I think, might actually be a frappato from Sicily. It’s a really delicious light red that is very, very nice chilled. But hard to find!
Dish to make
There’s something magical about clams cooked in a sauce of onions, parsley and white wine. It’s so easy, but it looks so impressive.
Place to eat
For my money, the best noodles in London are at Xi’an Impression by the Arsenal stadium. They have really amazing hand-pulled noodles with big pieces of beef, but they also do really good dim sum and very cheap corkage.
Phil Wang is touring with his new show Wang in There, Baby! between now and February 2024. Tickets at philwang.co.uk
