Some writers turn to eating when they should be working. Some reward themselves with a good dinner only after a hard day at the word-processor. For others ... well, what better excuse for a drink? We asked 10 authors where they go when they want to give their minds a break and their tastebuds a treat.
And how do they like their food? Howard Jacobson says he needs the sound of the city when he tucks in. Barbara Trapido eats out for the good of her health - Middle Eastern does the trick. AL Kennedy doesn't much like food and grudgingly eats to stay alive. For Jake Arnott, it's the hunger that keeps him going. He prefers a proper Italian when he eventually stops - five leisurely courses. Food is like sex, he says. No, not in a Portnoy's Complaint way. It's just difficult to write about. And yet where would literature be without Jane Austen's teas, or James Joyce's 'inner organs of beasts and fowls', or the Famous Five's scrumptious picnics?
Adam Thirwell
Cafe - Lucky Seven
I think novelists write about food because all they do is eat. That's all they know about. They are stuck at home, and think, 'I'll make myself another sandwich because it's [the writing] going really badly.' I'm slightly schizophrenic about food. On the one hand, I love going to places that do food seriously, on the other, I like degenerate, tragic food. I come to Lucky Seven because it indulges my terrible kitsch love of American diners. I think that the three great things that America has given us are Coke, the hamburger and Saul Bellow.
I associate burgers with treats. It's a terrible, infantile longing for really childish flavours. I love making squiggly shapes with mustard and ketchup. When I was a kid, Wimpy was the coolest of all the burger places. Another Mecca was McDonald's; it's where I aspired to be. Now I don't go to McDonald's unless I'm very drunk/hungry/haven't got any cash on me because the food there makes me feel ill. I don't think I could go out with someone who hated eating. I don't mean they need to weigh 200 pounds and have to be lifted by a crane into buildings, but they have to enjoy food.
· Lucky Seven, 127 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 (020 7727 6771). Politics by Adam Thirlwell (Jonathan Cape) is out in paperback.
Howard Jacobson
Cafe - Carluccio's
I live in Soho, which means I can walk here in six minutes. I've always wanted to live in town because I don't feel like I'm alive unless there's noise. You pass the rag-trade area on the way to Carluccio's, which I love because everyone I grew up around in Manchester was either in retail or wholesale, so even the walk to my favourite restaurant is a pleasure. I love to sit outside Carluccio's and listen to the sound of traffic from Oxford Street, while enclosed in a little oasis of quiet. One of the curses of restaurants is you either can't get the eye of a waiter or they won't leave you alone. Here you can lower your eyes and they leave you; raise them, and you'll be entertained.
It's very much a place that I associate with laughter. I come here with friends once a week. We say, 'Let's go to Carluccio's to laugh'. I think the reason why it's so conducive to mirth is partly the food is such that you don't feel you have to give it serious concentration. I don't like going to a restaurant when I'm there to revere the food. I'm drawn instinctively to heavy food and I love red food because it's the colour of my rage. This is one of the only places I've ever been where I can eat white food, and if I don't eat meat, I never come away feeling cheated.
Last week I had a wonderful pumpkin risotto, which was white and yellow and, although I was longing for my companion's pasta with tomato sauce, my anger levels came down and I felt very calm. My instinct is to eat out, which is why I need a reasonably priced place like this nearby. If I've had a good day's writing I'll want to go out and eat. Sometimes if writing flags, then I'll say to myself, 'Be a good boy, stay working, and you can go to Carluccio's tonight for a treat'. Then it happens, the words flow. It works every time. Antonio Carluccio is a wonderful ad for his cafes. I would not want to eat at a place that's owned by a thin man.
I couldn't go to a Jamie Oliver restaurant , because I don't want food conceived by a child. I want food that is conceived by someone who has been in the world a long time: I like to feel that my food is ripened. The people who come here are ripened, too. In Soho the restaurants are filled with kids in their first jobs in the media. I hate it. Here you see the old and the young together, which I like. It's partly my Jewish schmaltz feeding into the Italian smultz. I go to Italian delis for taste and Jewish delis for nostalgia. I am absurdly attached to the bagel and chopped liver. Although, if we're talking my last meal on earth, sundried tomato, salami, Italian bread, and olive oil would probably win out over Jewish food. But it would be a tough choice that I hope I don't ever have to make.'
· Carluccio's Caffe, 8 Market Place, London W1 (020 7636 2228). Howard Jacobson's most recent novel is The Making of Henry (Jonathan Cape).
Marina Warner
Gastropub - Lord Palmerston
I am a slave to my computer, but when I do have lunch out I go to the Lord Palmerston. It used to be an average dark pub, but six years ago the windows became transparent: it was the first gastropub I went to. (The idea that you look through the windows of a pub, whereas before you had to screen off the wicked drinkers inside, has changed the look of cities completely.) I was amazed by the food and the fact you ordered it at the bar. Everyone does that now , but it was an innovation back then.
· Lord Palmerston, 33 Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 (020 7485 1578). Signs and Wonders by Marina Warner (Chatto and Windus) is out in paperback.
Irvine Welsh
Restaurant - Shanahan's On The Green
I'm a lapsed vegetarian, so red meat is my guilty pleasure. Now I relish a well-cooked steak with a glass or two of red wine, and Shanahan's serves the best steak I've ever tasted. They are huge thick bastards that melt in your mouth and sit in your gut for three days. I'm living in Dublin while my girlfriend is at university here, so I have at least three years to cram in as much of the best steak in the world as I possibly can.
The reason why Shanahan's works really well is that it doesn't try to be too fancy. It's got the kind of service we don't get in the UK. It's probably because of the class system, but I've always found that the waiters in posh British restaurants are either really snooty or really servile, whereas here they are relaxed and easy going. If this place was in the UK it might become pompous, but it manages to be comfortable even though it's opulent. There is an Irish-American thing going on (which is a wee bit dodgy in this day and age) and it has got interesting bits and pieces around, like John F Kennedy's rocking chair.
Before Trainspotting, going to restaurants was a luxury for me, which is probably why I got into cooking. I'm quite a good cook now, but it was a slow evolution. The Irish do seem to be obsessed with red meat. If they have money here, they just buy more red meat and drink more Guinness, they won't buy packaged food or grab a McDonald's.
I've been thinking a lot about food over the past year. The book I'm writing now has a lot of references to food in it. It looks at how your diet can change you. Anything you ingest is a part of you. If you are eating a certain kind of food it has an effect on you; makes you more short-tempered, vulgar, pompous and slovenly. And it's not just the physical side that I'm interested in, it's also the social rituals surrounding food. I've always been accused of only writing about drugs and drink, but when you see behaviour-altering additives in kids' foods and the amount of sugar in fizzy drinks, it's hard not to see food as another mindaltering drug.
· Shanahan's On The Green, 119 St Stephen's Green, Dublin (00 353 1407 0939). Irvine Welsh's next novel is The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chef
Andrew O'Hagan
Restaurant - Fratelli Sarti
None of the best Italian restaurants are in London. One or two are in Italy, but most of them are in Glasgow, and none is better there than Sarti on Bath Street. My idea of an Italian restaurant when I was growing up was an ice-cream parlour, which are plentiful in Scotland. You went there for the ice cream, the chips, and the jukebox - a vivid world altogether, which I made the setting for my last novel, Personality- and the cafes themselves were often beautiful Art Deco palaces full of slick people with big characters.
But Fratelli Sarti is something else again. The first time I went was a rainy day in the Seventies. My mother and I had tried to visit my granny, who lived next door to Celtic Park; she wasn't in (nobody phoned anybody in those days) so we ended up in Sarti's, just to keep out of the rain and escape the smell of vinegar in Argyle Street. In more recent years, Sarti's has become an excellent location for late-night daftness over a couple of bottles of Barolo. There's such a sense of old Glasgow about it, a place where people don't go out in order to be bored but to gladden themselves.
My favourite dish is Spaghetti allo Scoglio Sarti, full of pink crustacea and nice clams. People forget that Glasgow is by the sea, but I love restaurants that make something of that closeness, bringing mussels and whelks and Firth of Clyde-reared cod onto the menu. Sarti also does the best ravioli: there is a dish called Tondoni alla Pesciatina a Mano, which is large parcels filled with Parma ham covered in ragu. I'm sure you could get drunk on Sarti's ragu, it's so red-winey and dense. This all makes it sound a bit serious; the point of Sarti's is that it's a family-owned place with no pretensions. There's something a little bit Mario Puzo about the set-up - red checked tablecloths, below-street-level secrecy but it's one of those places where you feel they want to look after you.
I've never met anybody I know in Sarti. It's just Glasgow ladies who lunch - wonderful women with yellow hair, with many rings on their fingers and a very precise way of speaking. Bath Street, where the restaurant stands, is one of those places that is now unrecognisable from 20 years ago. Since money came into Glasgow, places like Bath Street are full of smart long bars, with long-stemmed lilies and bowls of lemons. You used not to get that in Glasgow. Now everyone's in a movie, or a TV show, drinking champagne out of long flutes on a Friday night. I'm not really very fussed about eating. It's drinking I like. I'm usually running about when I'm in Glasgow, writing or giving readings, and I always want to end the day drunk and happy. I spell that out because, in Glasgow, being drunk and happy doesn't always follow: drunk and unhappy is more like it. Sarti's is a little dream in my head as I'm going about my work in London: the perfect place to shelter from the rain.
· Fratelli Sarti, 121 Bath Street, Glasgow (0141 204 0440). Personality by Andrew O'Hagan (Faber and Faber) is out in paperback.
Barbara Trapido
Restaurant - Al-Shami
Food is my hobby. I work at home and I find an interest in food can be a terrible occupational hazard. My mind often wanders towards the kitchen: it's like having a little holiday every time I open the fridge. But I also love going out to eat, and I'm especially fond of Middle Eastern food. We had a wonderful reunion here at Al-Shami which, for a family as dispersed as mine, was a treat. The restaurant is directly opposite the synagogue - the rabbi is a regular visitor. The food is so unmessed around with. My favourite thing to do is to get umpteen starter dishes. I've always felt that someone ought to redesign the Cornish pasty; it's a lumpy, doughy mess compared to the light pastries you get here.
People do a lot of eating in my books. I think it's fun writing about food, particularly horrible food. I noticed in Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club he describes this horrendous early Seventies meal and I remember thinking, 'This takes me back'. Food can be very evocative. My most recent book, Frankie and Stankie, is about my childhood memories growing up in South Africa and I put in lots of details about food I remembered from the time: there was masses of cheap fresh fruit; we had a much more varied diet than the average Brit at that time, but each segregated colour kept to their own recipes and ingredients. Cape Town did have quite a significant Indian population and, although my parents were unusual in that they crossed racial barriers, they were separated by law and geography, so the Indian habits of eating okra, lentils, peppers and aubergines didn't enter white people's cuisine until the Sixties.
Both my parents had left Germany young, in the Thirties, and met in Cape Town, so they learnt to cook from books, rather than through family knowledge. In those days cook books were not seductively written. Reading Elizabeth David in the Sixties for the first time was a revelation for me. Her chapters were like little novels - the recipes allowed you to explore the world through flavours.
· Al-Shami, 25 Walton Crescent, Oxford (01865 310066). Barbara Trapido's most recent novel is Frankie and Stankie (Bloomsbury).
David Lodge
Restaurant - Henry Wong
I once read an AA Gill article in which he argued that what everyone needs is a good neighbourhood restaurant, where you know they'll look after you. He was right, and it's for exactly those reasons that my wife Mary and I got into Henry Wong's Cantonese restaurant: it's in our local high street, we know the owners, and we are never let down by the food (it's delicious). We moved near to Harborne, an inner suburb of Birmingham, nearly 20 years ago and we've been regulars at Henry Wong since then. What really attracts me to Henry Wong's is that it is blessedly quiet. I'm hard of hearing and have to wear a hearing aid, which magnifies background noise. Thankfully, Henry Wong has carpets, tablecloths and muted music. Some fashionable restaurants push the tables too close together, but here the tables are well spaced so you aren't forced to listen to your neighbour's conversation.
Eating in good restaurants was a rarity for me when I was starting out as a writer, but now I take it for granted. When I'm in London, the place where I eat most often, especially when I'm on my own, is the Caffe Uno on Charing Cross Road, which is excellent value. I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. My mother was a conservative cook, and I don't have much nostalgia for the food I was given as a child. I'm rarely tempted by a Sunday roast, which I find very boring. I like Italian food, so I buy some fresh pasta from M&S and serve it with a home-made sauce. I also make chicken casseroles (never beef - I haven't eaten it since I got put off by the whole BSE thing). I'm fairly disciplined: my only snack is a couple of bread sticks, which I nibble on, accompanied by a coffee at 10.30 each morning. Food is important to me, but it doesn't often feature in my books. I will only put it in if it has a function in the novel. Food can tell the reader something about a character. For example, there is a restaurant scene in my novel, Therapy, when the hero is on a blind date in LA with a fearsome facelifted blonde, who proceeds to quiz him about his HIV status while she orders fillet mignon 'very rare' and a Caesar salad. Some writers do food particularly well. Dickens is good on feasts, James Joyce's The Dead is famous for its food descriptions, and you can tell from AS Byatt's books that she enjoys her food.'
· Henry Wong, 283 High Street, Harborne, Birmingham ( 0121 427 9799). Author, Author is out in paperback (Penguin) in July.
Jake Arnott
Restaurant - Metrogusto
I used to live around the corner from Metrogusto and I stumbled upon it when it opened four years ago. I love very good Italian food. One of the perks of my job is that I get to travel and I love being invited to a literary event in Italy. If you do an event in the UK you get a glass of wine and a sandwich, whereas in Italy they turn out spectacular five-course meals. The English often feel awkward in certain restaurants, I think it comes down to that class thing. Italians, on the other hand, have a feeling that everybody should eat and drink well. It's not something they do to show off.
I still like the old-school Italian cafes that are full of character, but what I like about Metrogusto is that it's unique. The decor is a mix of old and new, the atmosphere is lively and relaxed and the food delicious. It's a place for celebrations and it's always been a big thing for my partner Richard and me. Another of my favourite restaurants is Elena's L'Etoile in London's Fitzrovia. In my last book I had a scene between Ruby Ryder, an ageing blonde actress, and a younger women, and Elena's was perfect for their meeting because it's just the sort of showbizzy place Ruby would go to.
Setting a story in a certain restaurants, even if the reader doesn't get it, is really useful to a writer because you know where you are and you don't even have to describe it. It's harder writing about food, which I find a very delicate process. It's a hard thing to do because you are talking about something very sensual and it lends itself to a lot of cliches. It's much easier to write about bad food, just like it's much easier to write about bad sex. If I'm writing, my big thing is to cook a proper roast dinner, have a feast on my own, and live off the pickings for a few days. Writing is about closing down what's around, and I rarely find I'm distracted by food. I actually think it's good to work on an empty stomach because, somehow, the hunger keeps me going.
· Metrogusto, 13 Theberton Street, London N1 (020 7226 9400) Jake Arnott's truecrime (Sceptre) is out in paperback.
AL Kennedy
Cafe - Maison Bertaux
I like Maison Bertaux because it's not a chain, and it's nice and scruffy. You need a degree of grubbiness in a good cafe. I go to places like this when I haven't had breakfast, I've forgotten lunch, it's nearly dinnertime and I am about to fall over because my blood sugar is down to my knees. Whenever there has been some kind of temperance movement, there's been tearooms. Kate Cranston had the Willow Tea Rooms, which were designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but that scene died out. Now, it's a renewed scene, so all the cafes in Glasgow are quite modern. This is a proper old-fashioned cafe, which is harder to find. When I first moved to Glasgow, Burger King was my cafe. It was so bad it was kind of bearable, and if you walked in, there would also be a pal there suffering the coffee that didn't taste of coffee and a pie that didn't taste of pie. Its lemon meringue pie was a satanic thing that was obviously made of chipboard and fish nostrils and grass.
I used to hang out with loads of people who didn't have jobs, so we nursed the routine. I still don't make any money, but somehow I got away from Burger King. Writers are all greedy bastards. At the free food table at the Edinburgh Book Festival, we're all taking armfuls. They are all blaggers and chancers. If you leave sandwiches out, writers will thumb through them like second-hand paperbacks, to find the bits they like. We don't like greens and fruit. If we're together we're like kids and eat crisps and cakes and chocolate.
I'm too Calvinist to like food. I eat to live, I don't live to eat. I went to one of those fancy places in Belfast which was awful. First, they wouldn't let me have potatoes, and then what arrived came in bits, and by the time I'd got through all the twigs and leaves and hair there was no food. My characters tend to take my viewpoint on food; they are not interested unless they can swallow it, or they can chew it, or it poisons them. I tend to come out in lumps if I'm reading a book and it's got recipes in it. If the title page of every chapter is a recipe, I don't know why it's there. Kurt Vonnegut did it once and that was excusable.
· Maison Bertaux, 28 Greek Street, London W1 (020 7437 6007). AL Kennedy's most recent novel is Paradise (Jonathan Cape).
Jenny Diski
Pub - The French House
The French really was the centre of all my dreams. This was the only place I ever felt I belonged. It's a tiny little bar in Soho, around which stood ageing, decrepit, dying alcoholics. It was all smoking and wood and old people, some of whom were great writers and painters, some of whom thought they were; some were just deadbeats. I was a hanger-on. I was 15 when I first went, but I felt safe with these old, hopeless characters. It's very hard to justify it really, but I did. I wanted to know people who knew stuff and, somehow, it seemed perfectly clear to me that, if you knew stuff , you were obviously going to be a drunk because knowing it would probably make you a drunk. I was learning to become one I suppose, but what I really wanted to be was a writer.
My idea of being a writer wasn't going to writing festivals or readings, doing corporate stuff, it was hanging around in smoky places having just done a couple of thousand words. I don't think the fantasy that I had about being a writer is available now, it's a more corporate fantasy and it's much more about money and fame. I got into the club by being young and slim and sleeping with everybody. The men there expected young girls like me to want to sleep with them. You had to learn how to do sex because that was terribly important. People didn't see it as paedophilia in those days; being good in bed was of the essence. So, in fact, you didn't have to be a writer by any stretch of the imagination. Most of them didn't do any work anyway; it was bollocks, all fantasy.
People like Henrietta and Michael Law, Anthony Carson, Johnny Minton, Francis Bacon and all his mates used to go. I was friends with members of the New Left and we all stood in this great mass of people in this very small space and smoked and drank and listened to Gaston, who was the son of the original French owner (which is why it's called the French), making pompous jokes while twirling his moustache. Chicago sat at the left-hand corner of the bar. He was a huge black American guy (presumably from Chicago) and he just sat with his whole great big fleshy self weighted on the bar ruminating and saying 'Hiii'. Someone would buy him a drink and the trick was to keep him lubricated .
That period of my life ended quite suddenly when I had what they used to call a breakdown. I went to the bin when I was 19 and when I came out I was more ready for drugs than alcohol. So I went off to the wonderful world of Covent Garden and the Arts Lab and I got into drugs in a very big way. I didn't go back to the French because it was finished: the people had died or dispersed. Eventually it became a parody of itself when Gaston retired. I came back here for the fi rst time since the Sixties when the restaurant opened with Fergus Henderson as chef. Whenever I come back it's like walking into my past, but I'm relieved I can go upstairs and eat, instead of standing around waiting for someone to notice me.
· The French House, 49 Dean Street, London W1 (020 7437 2477). Jenny Diski's After These Things (Little Brown) is out in paperback.
