The land of restaurants is increasingly paradoxical. Every day, good ones close. Running costs are punitive and broke customers are eating at home more often. Yet still there are places where it’s next to impossible to bag a table; where to have even the remotest chance of doing so requires near superhuman levels of patience and determination, as well as no other demands whatsoever on your time – including paid employment.
I laughed when I read in the New Yorker’s annual food issue of the “reservation scalpers” who make $80,000 a year by hoarding bookings to then sell them on to the desperate-to-be-there rich. Only in Manhattan, I thought. But this didn’t stop me. Just moments later, I was urging my neighbour, Sue, who is to restaurants what Harry Houdini once was to padlocks and straitjackets – just you watch her bust her way in! – to try to get us a table at X (I won’t say its name, for obvious reasons). Sue is also a hoarder of reservations, with the key difference that she then shares them with (I flatter myself) beloved friends at no extra charge. So now we’re on tenterhooks, waiting and hoping – and hoping and waiting – for the hottest Sunday lunch in town.
This column comes to you from Sheffield, the greatest city in the world, where I’ve just seen an exhibition at the Weston Park Museum about the rivers on which the city’s once great industrial might was originally built. In case you’re wondering, there are five such rivers, and as deracinated as I am, I can recite them in my sleep, largely because at junior school our houses were called – here we go – Don, Loxley, Porter, Rivelin and Sheaf (I was in Loxley; we lost at everything).
The exhibition is small but enjoyable. For children, there is a taxidermy water rat and a sewage pipe with a section cut out to reveal all kinds of disgustingness. For adults, there are brooding oil paintings of factories and tilt forges. I was especially taken by The Big Chimney, Sheffield, an etching from 1910 by Joseph Pennell, a name unfamiliar to me. When I got home, I looked him up. It seems that Pennell was an American who, in 1883, made a study of Sheffield’s steel industry, producing illustrations that were printed in Harper’s Magazine. “Two things always impressed me in that town,” he said later. “The boiling water in the rivers and the abominable habits of the natives in the streets, who from… behind walls and other safe places ’eave arf a brick at you if you dare to draw.”
Eave arf a brick? He may have been a prolific and talented artist, but he had no ear at all for accents.
In the museum shop, I’m tempted to buy a tin of Nipits, old-fashioned aniseed and liquorice pellets that “clarify the voice and clear the throat”, which have been made in Sheffield since the 1920s. I resist, making do instead with a walk in the General Cemetery, where the city’s great confectioners are buried. My brother comes with me, on the grounds the place is eldritch even in the middle of the day, and together we seek out the graves of Charles Butler, famed for Mint Rock, of George Bassett, whose company went on to create Liquorice Allsorts, and of Albert Simpkin, whose descendants still manufacture Nipits.
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When we were children, the General Cemetery, opened in 1836, was forlorn and overgrown, its Greek- and Egyptian-style buildings unloved and crumbling. Now, it’s almost ritzy. The sexton’s lodge in the Grade II*-listed gatehouse is an Airbnb with underfloor heating.
Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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