1. Blag a table next to Bono with the new inn crowd
Money can't buy you a reservation at the world's hippest restaurant. You have to be A-list famous or on air-kissing terms with one man. Polly Vernon tries to get a booking.
I am standing outside the Waverly Inn, a two-and-a-bit room restaurant which occupies the ground floor of a creaky town house located in New York's elegantly ramshackle West Village. It's 5.45 on a Sunday afternoon. I am afraid. The Waverly doesn't look like much: it's not at all grand from the outside, an unassuming, dusty corner joint. I'd never have noticed it if I hadn't been looking for it. But I know its reputation, and I calculate I'm moments away from certain humiliation at the hands of a maitre d', or a superior bus boy or coat-check girl, or whoever it is who will reject my halting requests for a table, in the most damning manner conceivable. Still, I've got to give it a whirl. No tour round fashionable New York is complete without some brush with the Waverly. When Graydon 'Vanity Fair' Carter's dining club/celebrity speakeasy 'soft-launched' in January, it transported the private bar and It restaurant scene to previously unimagined levels of elitist exclusivity. Everyone came. But not everyone got in. In fact, almost nobody got in. 'It does accept reservations now,' confirms a scenester friend-of-a-friend. 'What is hard is getting a reservation that won't get bumped if someone better than you turns up, or a reservation for the back room, which is where the glitterati sit.' 'Your only hope,' wrote a New York food critic, 'is to turn up on the doorstep, and beg.'
So here I am. After a couple of false starts (during which I fall over my feet; they're refusing to carry me on like race horses, because they know this experience cannot end well for my aspirations), I stick my head round the battered front door. 'Hello,' says a man, who is so screamingly handsome I nearly collapse, 'we're not open yet.' I ask if I can look round, hoping that if I bond with him, he may give me a table. Or sleep with me. He says: 'Yes!' and ushers me in. I shoot into the back room - which, I happen to know, has hosted Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Bono, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and Lenny Kravitz. It is as small, creaky, dimly lit and chintzy as its exterior; unremarkable apart from the $50,000 Edward Sorel mural that spans the length of one wall, and features caricatures of Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote and others. 'Go and check out the garden,' says the handsome man. I think this might be code, a preamble to the rejection. The garden is the Waverly's least-desirable 'Siberia' section; when I get there, however, I discover that 'Siberia' is small, but gorgeous. If I didn't know it was Not Hot in Waverly World, I'd really want to sit here. I turn to the handsome man. 'Can I, er, have a table?' I whisper. 'No,' he says, gently. 'Not even in the garden?' 'No,' he says again. Resigned, I get a V&T in the all-comers-welcome-limboland of the rickety bar. I could stay here all night, and eye up le tout socially significant New York. Or I could go to the funny gay bar two blocks away, drink heavily and do hip-hop karaoke. I leave.
· Waverly Inn, 16 Bank St, New York
2. Shop location, location, location
What are the best-dressed larders wearing this season?
Not unexpectedly, Harvey Nicks has a few new trends truffled away up its sleeve. According to my whippet-thin mole at the store, what you really want in your life is a little cache of precious 'micro leaves' from Secretts, the suppliers of A-list salad. These are very small, high-tech leaves with intense, dense flavours. Serve them with Ibérico pig (very now) and a small, cool sherry (so now it's almost tomorrow). Alternatively, treat yourself to a bottle of St Germain - the world's first elderflower liqueur - or a glass of ice-chilled Organic Coco Juice from Dr Antonio Martin. This nectar is extracted from the heart of young, still-green coconuts, in a process which guarantees the juice never comes into contact with light and air - 'the juice is fooled into thinking it is still inside the coconut' says my excited molette, 'resulting in fresh juice, with no preservatives of any kind'. Clearly, what we're after these days is absolute purity and plenty of kinetin to slow down the ageing process.
Not long ago, you may recall, exotic food was the way to wow guests. 'Ta-da!' Rosemary would announce as she unveiled a fuzz-free mini kiwi. 'This is the first one in the country!' Now, of course, the far-fetched and foreign has given way to a more mundane - but just as tasty - way with food, designed to curb those devilish food miles. Mark Hix, chef-director at the Ivy, no less, is championing all manner of local delicacies - coiled Cumberland sausages, Geordie stottie cake and Lancashire treacle toffee.
When in Stoke-on-Trent, for example, go for the Staffordshire oatcake. In Market Drayton, track down the town's famed gingerbread (baked there for more than 200 years, it is designed to be dunked into an accommodating glass of port). Indeed, few places don't boast a regional speciality. Liverpool? Lobscouse (a poor man's meat and veg stew - which explains why Liverpudlians are known as Scousers). If it's Herts, it must be perry. Nottinghamshire? Bramley apple pie. Black Country? Faggots!
It goes without saying that everything must be seasonal. There is nothing more de trop than asparagus in October. Since you ask, the meal of the mo is brown crab and radishes (pulled fresh from your own patch). In fact, a seasonal, local, organic radish - fairly traded with your neighbour for a bunch of mini sorrel - is about as hot as eating gets right now.
MS
What to put in your larder
Risk: slugs, snails.
Benefit: your friends will marvel at your muck-caked fingernails (so much more now than a French manicure).
3. Drink the £32 sip of wine
It could cost £1,000 to get tipsy at Selfridges But you do get to drink Pétrus
There is a flipside to the current eco-madness and brow-beating frugality. And how couldn't there be in a nation that now boasts 68 billionaires, wall-to-wall oligarchs and city bonuses to make your bottom lip quiver? What, you might wonder, are they spending it all on? Sources reveal that your average Russian magnate employs a private chef who can replicate any dish on Nobu's menu. Meanwhile the City's money is being splurged on magnums of Dom P and Mahiki's £100 cocktails.
Such luxury finds its natural resting place in the Wonder Bar, soon to open at Selfridges. Here, the passing wine fancier can have a sip (25ml) of 1996 Château Pétrus, for £32. If you want more of a gulp, you can splash out (just don't spill it) on 125ml for £160. This works out at £1.28 a ml - about enough to dab behind your ears as a perfume.
It's all part of the Wonder Room, which will stock brands specialising in luxury with a quirk - Hermès, Tiffany, Chanel - in what Selfridge's Ewan Venters calls 'a bazaar of special things'. Chief among these is one of the UK's first Enomatic Wine System - a gadget that dispenses exquisite mouthfuls of 52 exceedingly fine wines via a self-serve nozzle. 'This gives people the possibility of tasting something quite special, that they would otherwise not be able to afford,' explains Venters. 'That Pétrus would retail at £940 a bottle. The idea is to knock the stuffiness out of things, to break down the mystique surrounding wine, it will become the personal shopping of the wine world.'
Wonder Bar, continues Venters, tunes in to a key trend in food and wine - the idea that 'people want better quality, for which they'll sacrifice quantity'. It's the antithesis, if you like, of All-U-Can-Eat, stuff-it buffet, and it dovetails nicely with another movement taking root in the nation's appetite: that of connoisseurship.
Says Venters: 'It's happening with chocolate and coffee as well as wine. There's a definite move towards people wanting to know more, to understand about varieties and origin.' Best hide the Shiraz-in-a-Box if you want to join in.
Why do it: oenological wisdom will mark you out as an individual of integrity and depth, and can be very useful in pub quizzes.
What to say: 'Excuse me, but has someone left the tap running?'
Fancy a gulp - or two, or three?
A 'sip' at Selfridges' Wonderbar is 25ml (5 teaspoons of wine). Try a sip of 2003 Pinot Noir, £2.55; 1997 Barolo £5.85; or a whopping £32 for a 2001 Petrus.
MS
4. Save the planet. convert to veganism
Meat? Or two veg? If you're remotely interested in saving this timeworn planet, then you probably need to become a vegetable-based life-form, and soon. A recent report in the New Scientist confirmed that meat and dairy production causes environmental degradation on a huge scale, including erosion, water pollution and loss of biodiversity. What's more, the world's one-and-a-half billion head of cattle (and 1.7 billion sheep, plus the odd pig and goat) produce enough methane and nitrous oxide to make up 18 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions. That's a higher share than transport.
A study conducted by the University of Chicago found that the typical US diet (about 28 per cent of which comes from animal sources) generates the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more carbon dioxide per person per year than a vegan diet with the same number of calories. Ah, the burger brigade might retort, but veganism comes with its own gristly issues too. It tends, for instance, to rely on imported crops such as nuts and soya beans so bang goes your food-mile quota. Novice vegans would also need to avoid illegal Amazonian soya, cultivated on land illicitly cleared of rainforest (If you are harbouring any in your fridge, your eco-rating has just plummeted like a dying duck).
Safer by far is to introduce more hemp into your life. According to nutritionists, the hemp seed contains 'the perfectly balanced 3:1 ratio of not just one but both essential fatty acids, Omega 3 and 6'. Win-win-win, and you can even smoke the leftovers.
Heroes: Stella McCartney, daughter of the original veggie sausage broker and all-round icon of the vegetable kingdom. Sadie Frost, strict vegetarian since birth, and Pamela Anderson, an unexpected vegan and the world's only woman known to be made almost entirely from a combination of tofu and silicone.
What to say: 'Curd is the word.'
Risk: as an L-plate veggie, the smell of sizzling bacon could send you to the very precipice of apostasy. But have faith! Hold fast, despite your own increased methane emissions being of grave concern to passers-by.
Benefit: vegetarians live longer. Actually, I made that up. It just feels that way if you have to get by in a sausage-free world.
MS
5. Be a frugal foodie
Still boiling without a saucepan lid? Wasting a new paper cup with every skinny latte? Shame on you. Any foodie with half a brain and a bit of soul is cutting back. It's a gastrobligation. Switched-on diners aim to grow most of their meals themselves, on land which they visit by tricycle each evening, there to tend to baby leeks and dandelion leaves with salvaged rainwater from a butt. These eco-pioneers, it goes without saying, are green all over: they boil only the precise amount of water to make their tea (nettle, probably, foraged from the hard-shoulder of the M27), and will never chuck past-it veg into the wheelie bin. Instead, it's turned into a nourishing soup.
In this age of ethical awareness, we are witnessing the rise of the Frugal Foodie - committed to rationing, bartering, baking and eking out (rather than eating out). They defrost the freezer regularly to keep a lid on their emissions and make their own lunch and walk it to work in Tupperware.
There's reason enough to embark on this grand project - and not only because there's a feel-good factor to be had in drinking local cider. One third of our food ends up in the bin, with each adult wasting £420 worth of leftovers every year - which amounts to £20 billion. That's a heck of a lot of soup.
Hero: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, an early adopter of nose-to-tail eating, not to mention roadside bartering and hedging.
What to say: 'Are you leaving that hairy pork rind?'
Risk: In certain postcodes, an allotment is prized more highly than a beach hut.
Benefit: It's not only the planet that gets a break: frugality will clearly save you money too, allowing you to pocket enough to buy a nice cow or sow. Fashion-forward readers might like to cut straight to the chase and buy a new handbag.
MS
6. Get a herring habit
Fish. What a palaver they can be. Grim to gut. Bones in your windpipe. And that's without even grappling with the rules about what is and isn't environmentally sound to eat with your chips. Right now, you should be eating South West mackerel (caught by hand line) or Loch Torridon Nephrops (Dublin Bay Prawns, caught off the north-west coast of Scotland) - these being the most local to our shores of the fisheries currently certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. The World Wildlife Fund, however, suggests we sample a range of fish to take the heat off the stocks we eat with such gusto. So lay off the cod, give haddock a break, steer clear of plaice and salmon (the UK's favourite) and go for pollack or saithe.
'But,' adds the WWF, 'it is important to eat cod from time to time, so that the market is not lost when the fish stocks recover.' Got that? Meanwhile, we should avoid fish which 'fit on the plate' (they're too young to die!) Better than anything, though, would be if we developed a serious herring habit, including whitebait, kippers, bloaters, buckling, cob and sprats. As the WWF reports, 'Herring was once an important part of our diet, but the collapse in the stock led to an outright ban in the 1970s'. So now there's loads of them out there. And herring, though hardly sexy, is oily, cheap, cheerful and abundant, the used-car salesman of the piscine world. And so very versatile: grilled, soused, pickled ... We should devour them in the manner of the Scandinavians. And why not? We sit on their flat-pack sofas, we use their mobile phones, so we may as well eat their lunch.
Risk: Trips to Ikea.
Benefits: Herring are high in omega-3 fatty acids, EPA, DHA and Vitamin D. They're low in the PCBs, dioxins and mercury, but have a healthy acronym level.
MS
