“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
— T.S. Elliot
Desire is a funny thing—stray too deeply, and it’s possible to forget one’s very self.
It pours into you until you are filled with something else, until you think like someone else and, if you happen to cook, for a time, you cook like someone else.
While working in Mumbai, the quite English Will Bowlby began his affair with Indian cuisine, because he had to, because it was heady and delicious, because, though we are all at liberty to fall in love, there are none so unbeholden as the chef.
The dalliance ended, and Will returned home cooking curiously like . . . himself.
His sensibilities had been his restraint—classically trained, he knew that potency must be counterbalanced with yet more potency. His well-informed menu would be part travelogue, part poem: it would not only describe, but embellish. It belongs to the genre of Modern Indian Cooking.
They say that British food is what made our explorers the best in the world—perhaps there’s a compliment in there.
Our third supper beckons us to Will’s restaurant under the railway arches of Brixton: Kricket.