We have been having adventures since I finished my last freelance gig. We have been going to the park to hang out with the pelicans in the sun, we have been popping into wildly expensive chocolate shops to buy just four luscious truffles in a little silver box, we have been taking the bus north and east to walk about in the derelict daytime of Hackney. Today we are going to Singapore. We will stop in the Amsterdam airport (Henny says there is cheese), and then we will go to Singapore, and then we will go to Haw Par Villa. Maybe twice! There is a website for Haw Par Villa that says, among so many other things:

Attractions include:
Scowling 7,000-kg gorilla
A monstrous sumo wrestler
The Statue of Liberty
The Ten Courts of Hell

...and so on.

“How is this possible?” Olive said, reading down the list. He considered, then said: “Are they reproductions?”

This is gonna be great. I don’t know how Mr French will stand three weeks in tofu country, but we can only hope he fights the good fight. Because, fellow adventurers, there will be tofu in guises many, and durians ’round every corner.

Saturday I made the chocolate cake and the Victoria sponge, Sunday morning I ran out of eggs. Giorgio Locatelli (and I know it seems like weeks now I have been talking about him) asks for 120 grams of egg yolks in his lemon mascarpone tart and 110 grams of egg yolks in his apple tart. “Giorgio!” you want to say, and I think I did, “A little help!” I understand that not all egg yolks are of the same weight – in fact, perhaps they are even like snowflakes, and no two egg yolks ever weigh the same – and although I use a wonky scale and tend to guess at measurements anyway, I understand the precision of a pastry chef. But it would be helpful (yes, Giorgio, I’m looking at you and your editor) if the recipe would read: “120 grams egg yolks, from about 9 large eggs”. That’s right: nine. Because let me tell you, no one knows how many eggs to have in the house for 120 grams of egg yolks, and someone is certainly going to run out of eggs on a Sunday morning two hours before the shops open. I went to the corner store in desperation, where the only other person in the shop, besides the cashier, was a young gent cradling all the eggs in his arms and balancing them up to the check-out counter. I wanted to cry.

It all came together, though, for Sainsbury’s comes to those who wait. I was in the shop at two minutes after noon, and back in the kitchen, with the mascarpone and the ninth egg yolk, by a quarter past. Five cakes for a four o’clock tea party requires efficiency and a sharp eye on the hour.



Nothing like cakes, honestly, and nothing like cakes on a cake stand. We ate, we drank, nobody spilled anything – what more could you ask? The only problem with being a hostess to thirteen is you don’t really get enough time to talk to everyone properly. I wanted to ask Dan about Khartoum and Tonia about the interview, Judith about Somerset and the hats, Claire about how she got where she is, Marc about the photographs and dinner at Locatelli, Kris about everything, I wanted to ask Eibhlin how come I know so little about her. I will just have to make up stories about all of them.

We made the risotto exactly as Giorgio Locatelli said. It took two and a half hours. He didn’t say it was going to take two and a half hours, but I guess I could have read through the recipe first. It included making a vegetable stock from the peelings and crushed stems of the asparagus. The peelings. Who peels asparagus? Giorgio Locatelli. Well, maybe Giorgio Locatelli’s sous sous petit chef. And, now, Olive. Also, had I read to the end of the recipe beforehand, I would have realised that he calls for one hundred and seventy five grams of butter, not just a hundred. The extra seventy-five grams were for beating into the risotto at the end, right before the parmigiano. Call me a philistine, but I have a funny feeling (a heavy, full, funny feeling) that it could have gone without. We had dinner at ten-thirty. I couldn’t tell if the risotto was better than when I made it in forty-five minutes with the store-bought Marigold Swiss Vegetable Bouillon Powder. Still, I feel good about knowing how to make a vegetable stock. This might not have been clear to me while I was spread out flat on the carpet at a quarter to midnight, fatigue and late-night risotto having felled me, but really I feel good about it now.

I tell you, though, what is much easier than cooking two-and-a-half hour asparagus risotto is GOING TO LOCANDA LOCATELLI FOR LUNCH. Mmm. Aaahhh. Yesterday. It was DIVINE. It was a birthday present, the latest in the world from the boy, and I remember that the last time I got a birthday present this late it was my iBook, so maybe it really is all about good things coming to those who wait. Next time I have to wait four months for a birthday present, though, someone’s getting a smack. Kidding. Kidding! I’ll just pout, Hong Kong actress–style, till my gu niang powers weaken whoever is in my path. Hmm. How can I make it so Giorgio Locatelli is in my path? So distractable, I am. I mean to say. Locanda Locatelli: OH but he knows what he is doing, this Giorgio Locatelli, filling his shop with dark-haired, dark-eyed Italians, swift on their feet and swifter, still, with the bread basket.

There were suits all over the place – so this is what normal business people get up to on a work day. I was in blue fishnet stockings. Olive was in Adidas. Maybe they thought we were Internet millionaires, I don’t know, I was concentrating on wielding my parmesan breadstick as if it were a long cigarette on the end of a longer cigarette holder. We started with prosecco, of course, because girl likes a sparkly, even though when Olive opened the wine list and I saw the prosecco at £7.50, I said: “IS THAT PER GLASS?” I am subtle.

This was not the moment when Giorgio Locatelli was in the dining room, though, please, I know better than that. When Giorgio Locatelli was in the room, I reached out my arm and pointed. I said: “Oh!!” He is a handsome man, Giorgio Locatelli, much more so than in the photographs; and I know I am starting to sound a little wild-eyed, but, like I assured Olive, I’m still on the safe side of adoration. “He is from the north of Italy, you know,” I said, in response to something or other, and Olive said, “Oh, where in the north?” “I don’t know,” I said, “I think that would be too much.” “Have you watched ‘The Fan’?” Olive asked. “Robert de Niro,” he precised, “plays a crazed fan of Wesley Snipes. I think he ends up kidnapping his wife or something, maybe something explodes.”

Giorgio Locatelli didn’t come to our table to shake our hand, but I don’t know what I would have said to him anyway. “Did you mean red onions or white onions for the asparagus stock?” “How big an onion?” “Does it take you two and a half hours to make your asparagus risotto?” “What kind of name is Plaxy?”

I wanted half the things on the menu, more than half probably, and I began to panic a little, but obviously this just means we will have to go back one day soon. I turned down the pan fried scallops in a saffron vinaigrette for the minced pork meatballs wrapped in Savoy cabbage. These came with two diamonds of panfried saffron risotto, crispy on the outside, oozy on the inside, nobody sitting around whinging about repetitive stress syndrome from the stirring, the stirring, the stirring. The Savoy cabbage–wrapped meatballs were bookends holding up a wing of flash-fried Savoy cabbage leaf, delicate, friable, salty.

Listen. Listen: Homemade chestnut tagiatelle with wild mushrooms. Read it again. Slowly. Taste it. Me, too, that is all I could do, because I turned it down. I didn’t think I could do pasta and pesce. The cod was very nice. Light, melty, and on a bed of wilted cabbage with sultanas and pine nuts. So unexpected a bed! So tasty a bed.

I was leaning forty-five degrees sideways in the booth, and still dessert was to come.

“Do you like the frittelle better,” I asked the waiter, referring to the banana and chocolate doughnuts with a side of coffee gelato, “or the pannacotta?” The pannacotta was of wild berries, and came with stracciatella gelato. You see how it was an impossible choice. The waiter, though, he did not hesitate. “Frittelle,” he said, and he looked me, seriously, in the eye. I said: “Okay!”

Oh, Giorgio. You say frittelle, I say kueh kodok. My grandmother used to make these “frog cakes” – although “kodok” really means “toad”, whatever – deep fried banana dumplings I remember sitting to dry in a pile on a sheet or two of kitchen paper. It was a terrible thing, waiting for the kueh to be cool enough to eat. Move too quickly, and you’d burn your tongue. It was a sensitive matter of expert timing. Giorgio Locatelli’s chocolate and banana frittelle came to the table just warm enough to pounce upon. They were a row of three mini pyramids with sugar dusted on their squared-off tops. Their centres held secrets of molten chocolate. It was late afternoon and the restaurant was almost empty. I remember a blonde woman sitting at a table off to my left. She had a precise fringe and long, straight hair. She was smoking a cigarette. I remember one of the waiters setting a table, smoothing out the white tablecloth. I remember thinking I could feel the cloth under his hands. It was very quiet, it was late afternoon, the restaurant was almost empty, their centres held secrets of molten chocolate. I had a small espresso by my side.

We walked home very slowly. We took the small streets south of Oxford Street. The sun was still out enough that the sky was blue.